Synthetic Biology Applications for Clean Meat Production

Clean meat — meat produced through cell culture rather than animal slaughter — can dramatically reduce the environmental footprint of meat while alleviating the severe public health threats and animal welfare concerns posed by factory farming. Recent developments in regenerative medicine, tissue engineering, and large-scale cell culture for cellular therapies have spawned a multitude of technologies that are immediately applicable to clean meat production. However, synthetic biology represents a technological paradigm whose potential is untapped with regards to application towards clean meat. This talk will discuss several pressing opportunities to apply mammalian synthetic biology advances to active areas of clean meat research. These include: engineering co-culture differentiation pathways for complex tissue formation in response to inexpensive triggers, reprogramming cellular signaling pathways to decrease reliance on exogenous growth factors, and developing optogenetic tools to spatiotemporally control cellular differentiation for marbling and structuring within meat tissues. As the demand for meat increases, severe resource constraints, climate considerations, and global food security concerns are motivating the search for new alternatives to our inherently inefficient current system of feeding animals in order to feed ourselves. Clean meat presents the only feasible alternative for producing real meat to satisfy this demand, and mammalian synthetic biology tools show tremendous promise for hastening the development and commercialization of this sustainable alternative.