All About Entomoculture: The Buzzin’ Future of Lab-Grown Meats
Cellular agriculture is an emerging field of production that focuses on creating animal-based products like meat, dairy, and leather without actually farming animals.
Instead, the products are grown from cells in labs, meaning that it is humane, significatly more eco-friendly, and safer for consumption. I wrote an article on the basics of cellular agriculture, you can read it here.
In the edible realm of cellular agriculture, the existing research tends to be focused on poultry and cattle. They are the most popular types of meat on the market today.
However, some other researchers are looking into less traditional cell sources for their lab-grown delicacies.
Natalie Rubio, who is currently working on her Ph.D. in Cellular Agriculture at Tufts University, saw an opportunity with insects. You can read about her experiments here.
While individuals with a more westernized pallet may shy away from the concept, eating insects isn’t all that strange across the world.
In places like Ghana, Thailand, and China, for instance, it isn’t all that uncommon to see different types of insects on the menu.
Even more Western companies are looking into insects as a source of protein, as they extremely nutrient-dense and, compared to their mammalian counterparts, are significantly simpler and more eco-friendly to breed. Companies like Entomilk, which makes luxury ice cream with cricket-based milk, and Chirps, which produces cricket-based protein powder.
But if insects are so easy to breed in the first place, why would you need to grow them in a lab?
Well, there always remains humane issues with the mass-production of living organisms. However, another major issue is the curb appeal of eating insects.
Due to their exoskeleton and abundance of legs, eyes, antenna, other unappealing crunchy bits, they aren’t exactly the most appetizing of specimens. For most protein sources, consumers tend to prefer larger cuts of muscle, like beef and chicken.
However, though you can’t see it without a magnifying lens, insects do have small amounts of muscle.
Even though these amounts are near microscopic, cellular agriculture is based on cells. There is plenty of muscle to be able to isolate cells from our buzzin’ buddies. That means that we can potentially grow something akin to a steak from fruit fly muscle cells.
Insect cells are also much heartier than mammalian cells, meaning they are harder to kill and easier to grow. They can tolerate a range of different temperatures, pH levels, and oxygen conditions that would kill their mammalian cell counterparts.
TLDR;
- Insect Cellular Agriculture(Entomoculture) is a promising new field in the alternative protein space. It works by isolating insect muscle cells and mutiplying them in labs.
Entomoculture
Entomoculture is the name for the science of lab-grown insect meat.
To be able to grow insect muscle as a food source, we first have to understand myogenesis. Myogenesis is how muscle forms. It happens in two phases; embryonic and adult myogenesis.
Some terms to know:
differentiate : The process in which a cell changes from one cell type to another
proliferate : To produce or form cells; especially, to produce cells rapidly
Embryonic Myogenesis
Embryonic myogenesis is the development of the somatic larval muscle of an insect. Its essentially baby bug muscle development.
Baby bug muscle development happens in the mesodermal layer of the embryo.
The process of growing the baby bug muscles starts with a bunch of groups of mesodermal cells. In each group of cells, one cell turns into a myogenic progenitor cell. This cell can differentiate into different kinds of muscle cells and proliferate.
The rest of the cells in the group become fusion competent myoblasts. These are cells with the capacity to fuse to form muscle.
Some of those myogenic progenitor cells we talked about earlier differentiate into muscle founder cells. Each muscle founder cell fuses with 4–25 of the fusion competent myoblasts through proteins from each cell type adhering to proteins in the other.
A protein from the founder cell that named ‘Dumbfounded’ attaches to the protein ‘Sticks-And-Stones’ from the fusion competent myoblasts. (Fun fact, proteins have weird names.)
And baby bug muscle is formed!
TLDR;
- In the middle layer of an embryo, (the mesodermal layer) groups of mesodermal cells make up embryonic muscles by differentiating into founder cells and fusion competent myoblasts. They fuse together in groups and form embryonic muscle.
Adult Myogenesis
In the last section, when talking about embryonic myogenesis, I said “some of those myogenic progenitor cells we talked about earlier differentiate into muscle founder cells”. Well, what happened to the rest of the myogenic progenitor cells?
They differentiated onto quiescent adult muscle precursor cells. These cells are cells that have already committed to becoming some kind of muscle cell. Since they are ‘quiescent’, that means currently they are dormant. However, once they are ‘activated’ they will start turning into muscle cells.
Adult myogenesis begins with the quiescent adult muscle precursor cells activating and starting to proliferate.
Just like in embryonic myogenesis, a few of those cells differentiate into muscle founder cells and the rest differentiate into fusion competent cells. Those cell types fuse and form myofibers.
First, these myofiber group together to form a myotendinous junction (the part that connects a tendon and muscle) with tendon cells.
Then, finally, the myofibers can form contractile muscle! (muscle that can contract)
BOOM! Adult muscle is born!
TLDR;
- Quiescent adult muscle precursor cells from the embryonic myogenesis now differentiate into founder and fusion cells. They fuse together and make myofibrils, which eventually form the muscle.
Now that we understand the process of muscle development in the insect body, what do we need to do to re-create this in a lab?
Cells
The foundation of cellular agriculture is cells. To produce a scaleable production of cells, the cells need to be able to multiply enough to maintain consistent growth.
Most cells have a limited amount of times it can divide, this phenomenon is called the ‘Hayflick Limit’.
This is a problem, as it means in the middle of growing insect meat, all the cells could simply stop dividing.
A way to get these cells to keep dividing is by immortalizing them. This is done by adding proteins, genes, or mutating the cells so they can continue multiplying without becoming tumorous.
There are very few established immortalized cell lines for insect muscle cells. The ones that are established have been noted to have limited differentiation. In order for the production of insect muscle to be scaleable, there would have to be better established cell lines.
But muscle cells aren’t the only cell type needed to create lab-grown insect meat. Fat cells are also needed for nutrition and flavor. Insect fat body cells are full of nutrients like protein, carbs, omega 3, and omega 6 fatty acids.
Growing fat cells alongside muscle cells is also beneficial. They store and release different nutrients for the cells. It is even expected to lengthen life and cause more contractions in the surrounding cells (contracting muscles are happy muscles), but they have yet to be grown together for cellular agriculture purposes.
Media
Media is what you feed the cells. This is another keystone, as what you feed the cells will impact their proliferation rates, their nutritional value, and keep them alive.
Media formulation is significantly easier with insect cells. Insect cells adapt well to serum-free media. Serum,or ‘FBS’ (fetal bovine serum), is a morbid byproduct of the meat industry and is in many different media formulations since cells tend to be particularly responsive to it.
FBS is very expensive, varies in effectiveness, and is far from cruelty-free. It is derived from cow fetuses.
Many mammalian cells have trouble adapting to serum-free media, but insect cells can adapt with ease.
Being able to take away FBS is better ethically and lowers the price point for the end products.
Scaffolding
Scaffolding is a problem because it’s serves as a mold for the cells to grow on. This means that you can’t take it out. It has to not only be structurally sound and in the right shape, but it has to be food-safe, tasty, AND picky cells have to like to grow on it.
But, again, insect cells are the cool kids of the cellular community. They grow on anything, and one promising material for scaffold engineering is chitosan sponges. Chitosan is derived from mushrooms, but is also found in the exoskeletons of insects. Therefore the insect cells are more than happy to grow on it.
Bioreactor
A bioreactor is like a cellular oven. It controls the temp, air pH, oxygen conditions, and all the other hyperspecific elements in a cell’s environment that they need to stay alive.
Because insect cells aren’t so particular, the bioreactors that they need are much simpler. They don’t have to closely monitor nearly as many elements. This means they will be much easier and more efficent to engineer and operate, resulting in a simpler production system with less enviromental impact and lower cost.
Takeaways
As our global population rises, with it our demand for meat grows. Alternatives that appeal to the masses are needed to sustainibly feed the billions of people on earth. Cellular agriculture is an up-and-coming field that has the potential to provide essential nutrients, quell cravings, and keep emissions lower for our planet.
Insects are a promising and exciting area to keep an eye on, and hopefully one day you will see entomoculture products in your stores!
works cited https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fsufs.2019.00024/full#B74
And special thanks to Natalie Rubio for helping me understand this science and get so interested in this area of research! She is the sweetest!
