Comment on Italy bans cultivated meat products
threelonmusketeers@sh.itjust.works 7 months agoGraphical Abstract
Yup, Tasmanian Devil facial tumor disease is indeed pretty graphic.
It should be noted however that the transmission is limited to within a single species, which recently went through a population bottleneck that resulted in their immune systems having difficulty telling each other’s cells apart. Something like a bovine-to-human transmissible cancer would be orders of magnitude more unlikely.
synthetic meat would be made out of muscle cells which are not immortalized
Wouldn’t the end goal be to create immortal cell lines for the various cuts of meat? Otherwise, we need to keep (albeit much smaller) populations of livestock around to continually harvest new cells from.
Quereller@lemmy.one 7 months ago
I am not so into synthetic meat ;-) So this is all speculation from my side. You can grow these cells for many cell divisions just not forever. So you keep a master stock of an early generation in the deep freezer (maybe 1000 vials). Then thaw one vial and expand the cells. Maybe you create a secondary derived stock. If they are old, thaw a fresh vial etc. If the/master stock is used up. Then you need to generate a new one.
P.s. regarding the transmissible cancer cells. I don’t think it would happen likely. I think the cells need to loose the MHC gene/protein for this. Just wanted to tell that it exists.
P.p.s I would be much more worried by viruses/ mycoplasma unknowingly infecting the cell culture. On the other hand farm animals are sick all the time too.