Advances in biochemical engineering/biotechnology最新文献

The culture medium is a central part of the cultivated meat technology, from biological, economical, and safety perspectives. Many cues to drive proliferation or differentiation of cells relevant for cultivated meat are biochemical and are therefore part of the medium. Traditionally, these cues came from fetal bovine serum (FBS), but that has been replaced by a set of components, often of recombinant origin. The culture medium is the costliest input in cultivated meat and therefore subject to intense efforts to reduce cost through simplification, by downgrading components, by replacing components with cheaper alternatives, and by being cognizant of appropriate timing of administration. In addition, reducing the volume of medium per kg of output needed is a subject of research and development. These modifications are all bounded by the need for culture medium to be food-safe and preferably chemically defined. Importantly, the use of medium needs to be as efficient as possible through smart feeding and judicious medium regimes to reduce waste to a minimum. Metabolic models and AI tools will further facilitate medium development leading to less experimental waste. It is expected that this progress will continue for many years leading to ever better media at lower cost, enabling commercialization of cultivated meat.

This chapter focuses on the fundamentals of animal cell culture for cultivated meat production. We will explore how cultivated meat companies approach cell cultivation to align with the industry's goals of creating food products that meet consumer expectations for taste, cost, and safety. Building on the foundations established by the "red biotech" industry, we have adapted many of its technologies but have also had to make significant advancements to address the unique requirements of food production. The chapter covers the current state of the art and highlights future developments in the field. We will explain the basics of cell culture, including production facilities, cell lines, cell culture growth conditions, and cell culture media. Special emphasis will be placed on growth media optimization, which remains one of the most critical areas of development. We will discuss general approaches for medium optimization including analytical methods for monitoring key quality attributes. Finally, we will present examples of optimization processes we performed in our platform using bovine embryonic stem cells for large-scale cell mass production.

Cultivated meat is developed as an alternative to livestock meat in reducing the negative externalities of the animal-based food systems. Prospective life cycle assessment studies have been used to estimate the potential environmental impacts of cultivated meat production. Results indicate that cultivated meat production has relatively high industrial energy demand, but lower land use requirements compared to livestock meat production. The climate impacts of cultivated meat depend on the source of energy used. Due to the low land use requirements, cultivated meat could have benefits to biodiversity by reducing the pressure to convert forests and natural habitats to agricultural land. Cultivated meat production could also reduce water use and emissions to waterbodies. The environmental impacts of different cultivated meat production processes are wide depending on the process design and sources of inputs. Life cycle assessment studies can guide the development of cultivated meat production processes towards sustainable options.

This chapter explores the quality attributes of cultivated meat, drawing parallels and distinctions with conventional meat to support future product development. It examines key technical, sensory, and nutritional parameters, like texture, water-holding capacity, color, flavor, and nutritional composition. The chapter highlights how cultivated meat's quality is shaped by cellular composition, scaffold materials, and postharvest processes and how these factors influence consumer-relevant traits such as tenderness, juiciness, and taste. It also discusses the potential of cultivated meat to match or surpass conventional meat in nutritional value, including protein content, amino acid profile, and micronutrient composition. Contributions from five cultivated meat companies provide an industrial context.

Cultivated meat (CM) has emerged as a promising solution to the environmental, ethical, and food security concerns associated with conventional meat production. However, realising its full potential depends on developing robust, scalable, and cost-effective bioprocessing strategies. This chapter explores the entire CM bioprocessing pipeline, from upstream challenges such as the development of robust cell lines, scaling up cell cultures, and evaluating different operating modes like batch, fed-batch, and perfusion to downstream processes such as biomass harvesting, purification, and product structuring. Key considerations include ensuring sterility, monitoring critical process parameters, and supporting effective cell proliferation and differentiation. Economically, the high cost of media and capital expenditures remain a major barrier to scale. Strategies such as media recycling, bulk ingredient sourcing, and in-house production are being explored to reduce costs. Emerging technologies like artificial intelligence, machine learning, and digital twins offer new tools for optimising operations, though adoption is still in early stages. As the industry progresses toward commercialisation, continued innovation in bioprocess engineering, guided by techno-economic modelling, will be crucial to achieving scalable and sustainable meat alternatives.

Scaffolds are customisable three-dimensional supports that are compatible with cell culture and thus suitable for a wide range of applications. One emerging application is cultivated meat production. Due to the complexity of cultivated meat products, multiple types of scaffolds would be required for the different manufacturing steps involved. Additionally, as cultivated meat is a food product intended for consumption, there are further requirements in the scaffold's material, properties and method of preparation that are necessary to achieve suitability for use in foods, as well as regulatory requirements for safe use. This chapter focuses on edible scaffolds with applicability in cultivated meat production, exploring established and emerging materials suitable for use in foods, methods for scaffold creation, as well as different types of scaffolds and the diverse roles they play across various stages of the manufacturing process.

The human body constitutes a living environment for trillions of microorganisms, which establish the microbiome and, the largest population among them, reside within the gastrointestinal tract, establishing the gut microbiota. The term "gut microbiota" refers to a set of many microorganisms [mainly bacteria], which live symbiotically within the human host. The term "microbiome" means the collective genomic content of these microorganisms. The number of bacterial cells within the gut microbiota exceeds the host's cells; collectively and their genes quantitatively surpass the host's genes. Immense scientific research into the nature and function of the gut microbiota is unraveling its roles in certain human health activities such as metabolic, physiology, and immune activities and also in pathologic states and diseases. Interestingly, the microbiota, a dynamic ecosystem, inhabits a particular environment such as the human mouth or gut. Human microbiota can evolve and even adapt to the host's unique features such as eating habits, genetic makeup, underlying diseases, and even personalized habits. In the past decade, biologists and bioinformaticians have concentrated their research effort on the potential roles of the gut microbiome in the development of human diseases, particularly immune-mediated diseases and colorectal cancer, and have initiated the assessment of the impact of the gut microbiome on the host genome. In the present chapter, we focus on the biological features of gut microbiota, its physiology as a biological factory, and its impacts on the host's health and disease status.

Microbes are the third major group of biospheric organisms after plants and animals. They are responsible for many natural circulations, including the rotation of elements. They return organic carbon for plants' use and dissolve minerals into organic cycles. Microbes contribute to the global gas and water balances. In animal digestion, they partake in the degradation and assimilation of nutrients. Typically, they act as communities where some strains are the most active at a given time point in the prevailing conditions. But they also live in a continuous state of succession, which precludes the maintenance of changeable balances. Whether functioning in soil, in our alimentary tract, or elsewhere, the micro-organisms decisively contribute to the restoration of various balances. As the microbiological scale differs significantly from our comprehension, we must nurture our understanding of the microbiome wherever it occurs. For example, one spoonful of yoghurt contains approximately as many bacterial cells as there are humans residing on Earth. Therefore, flexibility and interaction are the most advisable modes of operation in microbial biochemistry and biotechnological applications. As microbes tend to form communities, this modus operandi is worth instigating in our process industries and production technologies. The use of microbial mixed cultures most appropriately corresponds to the natural systems [1]. As biocatalysts in human endeavours of biorefining and bioengineering, they have become the most utilizable and producible kind of microbial components. Cooperation with microbes is a prerequisite for the continuous development of sustainable industries and food and health production. The microbial communities can be used to prevent and clean up pollution. In the process design, the microbiological dynamic balances make the highest productivity, repeatability, controllability, and withstanding of entropy. Although their effects have been familiar to our societies, e.g. in the fermentation of foods, their total capacity remains to be put into service. Hopefully, this book could help turn the next page in the development.

The fast growth accompanied with high substrate consumption rates and a versatile metabolism paved the way to exploit Vibrio natriegens as unconventional host for biotechnological applications. Meanwhile, a wealth of knowledge on the physiology, the metabolism, and the regulation in this halophilic marine bacterium has been gathered. Sophisticated genetic engineering tools and metabolic models are available and have been applied to engineer production strains and first chassis variants of V. natriegens. In this review, we update the current knowledge on the physiology and the progress in the development of synthetic biology tools and provide an overview of recent advances in metabolic engineering of this promising host. We further discuss future challenges to enhance the application range of V. natriegens.