Plant proteins as the functional building block of edible microcarriers for cell-based meat culture application

Abstract

Edible microcarriers are essential for developing cell-based meat in large-scale cell cultures. As they are required to be embedded in the final products, the microcarriers should be edible, biocompatible, cost-effective, and pathogen-free. The invention of edible animal-free microcarriers would be a breakthrough for cell-based meat culture. We reviewed the fabrication techniques and the materials of microcarriers, and found that plant proteins, having diverse structures and composition, could possess the active domains that are hypnotized to replace the animal-based extracellular matrix (ECM) for meat culture applications. In addition, the bioactive peptides in plants have been reviewed and most of them were resulted from enzyme hydrolysis. Therefore, plant proteins with rich bioactive peptides have the potential in the development microcarriers. Our work provided some new trains of thought for developing plant-based biomaterials as ECM materials and advances the fabrication of microcarriers for meat culture.

Keywords:

• Microbeads
• cytoaffinity
• hydrogel
• plant proteins
• cultured meat

Disclosure statement

The authors declare no conflicts of interest.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by a grant from Singapore ministry of education (MOE) grant (R160-000-B04-114) and by National University of Singapore (Suzhou) Research Institute Peak of Excellence program (Food Science and Technology). Kong Yan thanks Chinese Scholarship Council for overseas PhD scholarship.