Tufts University's Lab-Grown Fat Could Give Cultured Meat Real Flavor and Texture

Researchers at the Tufts University Center for Cellular Agriculture (TUCCA) have successfully produced fat tissue in the lab with a similar texture and composition to fat tissue that is naturally occurring in animals.

Most cultivated meat products in development lack the real texture of meat created by muscle fibers, connective tissues, and fat. Aside from texture, fat also contributes to meat's flavor. Producing cultured fat tissue in sufficient quantities has been a major challenge because the cells in the middle become starved of oxygen and nutrients as the fat grows into a mass. In nature, oxygen and nutrients are delivered by blood vessels and capillaries throughout the tissue. Researchers still have to replicate that vascular network at large scale in lab-grown tissue, so they can only grow muscle or fat to a few millimeters in size.

The researchers at TUCCA got around this limitation by growing fat cells from mice and pigs first in a flat, two-dimensional layer. They harvested those cells and aggregated them into a three-dimensional mass with binders such as alginate (developed from seaweed) and microbial transglutaminase (MTG), which are both used in some commercial foods. The aggregated fat cells appeared like fat tissue, and the team performed further experiments to see if they truly reproduced the features of native fat from animals.

They found that cell-grown fat bound with alginate withstood a similar amount of pressure as fat tissue in livestock and poultry. The cell-grown fat bound with MTG behaved more like rendered fat, similar to lard or tallow. This suggests that the texture of cultured fat can be fine-tuned using different types and amounts of binders so they resemble the real-life texture of fat within the meat.

For more details, read the news release in Tufts Now.