It sounds like something out of Jurassic Park, but this Australian startup is making mammoth meatballs from ice-age DNA. Image source: Mauricio Antón, CC BY 2.5, via Wikimedia Commons.
Huge steps are being made every day in the world of cultivated meat – that is, meat produced by culturing animal cells in vitro – but one Australian company is taking things in a strange direction.
It sounds like something out of Jurassic Park, but Vow, an Australian startup, has developed a new variety of cultivated meat using the DNA of the extinct woolly mammoth.
Vow is using the genes of the ancient mammal to boldly demonstrate the vast potential of lab-grown meat as an alternative to large-scale livestock production and slaughter.
In addition to the concerns for the welfare of livestock animals, animal agriculture plays a huge role in climate change and habitat destruction due to the massive scale of the industry.
As such, most companies in the business of cultivated meat are seeking to create viable alternatives to traditional meats such as chicken, pork and beef.
But Vow is taking things a step further.
The “mammoth meatballs” were created in collaboration with Professor Ernst Wolvetang of the Australian Institute of Bioengineering at the University of Queensland.
The team took the DNA sequence for mammoth myoglobin, a muscle protein that is key in giving meat its distinctive flavours, and utilised the DNA of modern elephants to fill the missing gaps in the extinct genetic code.
The sequence was then placed in stem cells from a sheep and replicated to grow the cells that would become the mammoth meat.
Vow CEO George Peppou believes the secret to incentivising consumers to transition away from conventional meat products isn’t to replicate them – but to invent new kinds of meat that can’t be produced through traditional means.
“We have a behaviour change problem when it comes to meat consumption,” said George Peppou.
“The goal is to transition a few billion meat eaters away from eating [conventional] animal protein to eating things that can be produced in electrified systems.
“And we believe the best way to do that is to invent meat. We look for cells that are easy to grow, really tasty and nutritious, and then mix and match those cells to create really tasty meat.”
For the adventurous foodie, unfortunately, the mammoth meatball isn’t quite ready for the public.
“We haven’t seen this protein for thousands of years,” said Wolvetang.
“So we have no idea how our immune system would react when we eat it. But if we did it again, we could certainly do it in a way that would make it more palatable to regulatory bodies.”
