Cellular agriculture

Cellular agriculture is a way of making animal-based products using cultivated animal, plant or microbial cells rather than animals themselves. It enables the production of things like cultivated meat, cultivated fish, animal-free leather and animal-free dairy.

The meat that we normally eat consists of muscle cells and fat cells derived from animals. Cultivated meat starts with a cluster of cells from a living animal, the size of a sesame seed. To produce cultivated meat that closely resembles ‘real’ meat in terms of its flavour and texture, those cells are then cultivated in a nutrient-rich liquid so that they too turn into muscle and fat cells. As a whole, they form a piece of cultivated meat. Another option is to make a hybrid product in which cultivated animal cells, such as muscle and fat cells, are mixed with plant-based material to make things like burgers, chicken nuggets and sausages.

The production of dairy products such as animal-free milk and cow-free
cheese is another branch of cellular agriculture during which researchers use
precision fermentation. It involves researchers modifying the DNA of micro-organisms such as yeast so that they make substances they wouldn’t naturally produce. Take cheese, for example: to make that, we need casein proteins found in milk. These provide the gel structure of dairy products. Researchers working on cellular agriculture have produced those proteins in yeast by adding a cow's casein DNA to the yeast. This process turns the yeast into a mini factory that produces the casein milk protein, which then enables the production of animal-free cheese from animal-free milk.

The production of cultivated meat and fish doesn’t require animals to die, but they do need to keep donating cells. In theory, if we were to replace all meat consumption in the Netherlands with cultivated meat, this would require about 1 million biopsies a year. That’s quite a lot. But there is a possible solution. Researchers have developed a way of reprogramming normal animal cells into a type of stem cells. These cells can divide indefinitely without the slow degradation of DNA that would occur in other cells.

WUR researchers are focusing on both cultivated meat and cultivated fish, particularly beef, squid and oily fish species such as salmon. Salmon is particularly interesting because it grows very efficiently. Cows and salmon can be thought of as a kind of system for converting plant proteins into animal proteins. Individual cells in a petri dish can do this more efficiently than a whole animal can. After all, they don’t have a body to maintain. Yet some cells are even better at it than others. Salmon is one of them. Salmon cells convert almost all the plant proteins found in their nutrition into animal proteins for us to eat. For beef and pork, that figure is somewhere between 10 and 40 per cent – though that’s assuming the nutrients and environment for the cells are optimal. WUR is therefore researching the best ‘recipe’ for the nutrient substrate (or growth medium) for animal cells. Researchers previously used animal-based substances for that. They are now searching for plant-based alternatives to make the process more animal-friendly and sustainable.

At present, cultivated meat, cultivated fish and other cellular agriculture products are not yet available in Dutch supermarkets. Tastings of cultured meat have been organised by companies and supervised by the Cellular Agriculture Netherlands Foundation. However, these tastings can only be carried out under strict conditions and for a limited number of people, as the product does not yet have regulatory approval for sale. In Australia, the United States, Israel and Singapore, cultivated meat has already been approved and is available in restaurants, though still only on a small scale.

Wageningen University & Research is one of the participants of The Cellular Agriculture Netherlands Foundation. This foundation is building a Dutch community of organisations that aim to create a healthy, sustainable sector around cellular agriculture, both in and outside of the Netherlands.

Participants include universities, startups, impact and sustainability organisations, value chain partners, and biotech accelerators. Read more on the website of the Cellular Agriculture Netherlands Foundation.