An Australian company could forever change the way we eat, as the Vow company created the world’s first meatball. extinct mammoth edible.
The project aims to demonstrate the potential of meat grown from cells, without the slaughter of animals, and to highlight the link between large-scale livestock production and the destruction of wildlife and the climate crisis, as noted in a article the newspaper Guardian.
The company has already investigated the potential of more than 50 species, including alpaca, buffalo, crocodile, kangaroo, peacock, and different types of fish.
George Peppou, CEO of wowsays the goal is to 2 get a few billion meat eaters to stop eating animal protein [convencional] to eat things that can be produced in electrified systems. And we think 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 we mix and match those cells to create really tasty meat.”
Vow worked with Professor Ernst Wolvetang, from the Australian Institute of Bioengineering at the University of Queensland, to create the giant muscle protein. His team took the DNA sequence of mammoth myoglobin, a key muscle protein in flavoring meat, and filled in the few gaps using elephant DNA.
This sequence was put into myoblast stem cells from a sheep, which replicated to grow into the 20 billion cells later used by the company to grow mammoth meat.
“It was ridiculously easy and fast,” Wolvetang said. “We did this in a couple of weeks.” Initially, the idea was to produce dodo meat, he said, but the necessary DNA sequences do not exist.
No one has tried the mammoth meatball yet. “We haven’t seen this protein in thousands of years,” Wolvetang said. “So we have no idea how our immune systems 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.”
Tim Noakesmith, who co-founded Vow with Peppou, said: “We chose the woolly mammoth because it’s a symbol of diversity loss and a symbol of climate change.” The creature is believed to have been driven to extinction by hunting by humans and warming the world after the last ice age.
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