What sounds incredible is now made possible by an Australian food producer: producing meat from an animal species that has long been extinct. Using the DNA of a woolly mammoth, the company has grown meat – and turned it into a meatball. However, the entrepreneurs did not want to try it themselves.
Finds of remains of the species, which became extinct in Europe about 11,500 years ago, are reappearing as the permafrost thaws. The fur and tissue are often still intact, so scientists have already succeeded in sequencing the mammoth genome and learn more about the life of the primordial giants.
Company also wants to point out potential
The Australian start-up Vow has now used this information to grow meat from the cells. The aim of the project, according to the company, is to draw attention to the potential of cultured meat to make eating habits more environmentally friendly.
“We need to start thinking about how we get our food. My biggest hope for this project is that many more people around the world hear about cultured meat,” said James Ryall, scientific director of Vow. On Tuesday, the ball was added to the collection of the Rijksmuseum Boerhaave – a museum for science and medicine in the Netherlands.
‘Not studied how the body reacts to old protein’
The product is usually a crazy publicity stunt – it is not intended for human consumption. “Normally we would try our products, but we were hesitant to try them right away because it’s a protein that hasn’t been around for 5,000 years. I have no idea what the allergy potential of this particular protein might be,” Ryall said.
However, the term “mammoth meat” is a bit of an exaggeration. It’s more of an artificially produced mammoth DNA. The scientists working on the project did not have access to a frozen supply of mammoth tissue. Instead, they focused on a protein found in mammals and identified the DNA sequence for that of a mammoth in a publicly available genomic database.
Elephant DNA as a gap filler
Using information from the genome of an African elephant, they filled in gaps in the mammoth’s DNA sequence. The scientists then placed the synthesized gene into a sheep muscle cell, which was eventually grown in a lab to produce 400 grams of meat.
“From a genomic point of view, it’s just one gene out of all the other sheep genes that is a mammoth,” said Ernst Wolvetang, a professor and senior group leader at the Australian Institute for Bioengineering and Nanotechnology at the University of Queensland, who was involved in the project. “It’s one gene in 25,000.”
hope for approval
According to Ryall, the mammoth myoglobin changed the appearance of the sheep’s muscle cells. If it were up to him, in addition to the rough animals from the Stone Age, artificially produced meat from 50 other special animal species could also be on the menu: including alpacas, buffaloes, crocodiles, kangaroos, peacocks and various types of fish. Vow now hopes to get regulatory approval soon to sell lab-produced quail meat in Singapore, the first country to legalize cultured meat.
Source: Krone
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