Australian Company Made Meatballs With Wooly Mammoth Protein
A meatball made using genetic code from a mammoth is seen at the Nemo science museum in Amsterdam, Tuesday March 28, 2023.
InternationalIndiaAfricaVow, an Australian biotech company that specializes in in vitro meat production, introduced meatballs with the protein of the woolly mammoth (Mammuthus primigenius). The company believes that its activities will contribute to the conservation of nature’s biodiversity.Employees of the startup together with researchers from the University of Queensland took information from public genetic databases about the mammoth DNA sequence, which is responsible for the production of the muscle protein myoglobin, which is largely responsible for the taste of meat.The missing fragments were supplemented based on data on the genome of modern elephants, the resulting sequence was synthesized and introduced into sheep myoblasts, which were then multiplied (a total of 20 billion hybrid cells were obtained) and used to grow meat.A mammoth meatball was presented to the public at Nemo, a science museum in the Netherlands.The entire process took about two weeks. However, no one knows yet what mammoth meatballs taste like.”We haven’t seen this protein for thousands of years,” said Professor Ernst Wolvetang, who worked with Vow to make the meatball. “So we have no idea how our immune system would react when we eat it. But if we did it again, we could certainly do it in a way that would make it more palatable to regulatory bodies.”Don’t expect to be adding Mammoth meatballs to your spaghetti anytime soon, Vow says the project was a one-off. Still, the company plans to put it through rigorous tests, just like the company says it does for products it does plan to bring to market.According to the Vow staff, the main goal of their project is not to mass-produce food with proteins from extinct animals, but to draw attention to the cultivation of meat in the laboratory.”We chose the woolly mammoth because it’s a symbol of diversity loss and a symbol of climate change,” said Tim Noakesmith, Vow’s cofounder.As part of its research, Vow, unlike a number of other companies of a similar profile, prefers to cultivate meat of unconventional animal species, such as alpaca, buffalo, crocodile, kangaroo and peacocks.”We have a behaviour change problem when it comes to meat consumption,” said George Peppou, CEO of Vow. “The goal is to transition a few billion meat eaters away from eating [conventional] animal protein to eating things that can be produced in electrified systems. And we believe the best way to do that is to invent meat. We look for cells that are easy to grow, really tasty and nutritious, and then mix and match those cells to create really tasty meat.”It is believed that unlike traditional animal breeding, this approach to meat production is more ethical, causes less damage to the climate and the environment and as Vow’s developments demonstrate, allows the creation of meat from exotic species with specified characteristics.This year, the company is preparing to start supplying cultured Japanese quail meat to restaurants in Singapore, the only country that currently allows the sale of cultured meat.
