Technology Trends

Many people around the world are eating meat and enjoying it. But meat has a number of adverse effects on human health because of the use of drugs used to raise livestock or on the environment because of pollution from farm animal wastes. Now, scientists from the University of Maryland are proposing new techniques to grow edible meat in their labs on an industrial scale. “The idea of culturing meat is to create an edible product that tastes like cuts of beef, poultry, pork, lamb or fish and has the nutrients and texture of meat.” The researchers say that demand for meat is doubling every ten years in countries like India or China and say that with their techniques, “a single cell could theoretically produce the world’s annual meat supply.” Ready to learn more?

As an appetizer, here is the introduction of the University of Maryland news release.

Experiments for NASA space missions have shown that small amounts of edible meat can be created in a lab. But the technology that could grow chicken nuggets without the chicken, on a large scale, may not be just a science fiction fantasy.

Now, let’s go for the entree. Below is an illustration of the process leading to a perfectly healthy hamburger… (Credit: University of Maryland)

Here are the steps: 1. Scaffold-based cultured meat production: 1. Myoblasts in petri dish; 2. Porous collagen microspheres; 3. Myoblasts form myotubes on collagen microspheres; 4. Bioreactor; 5. Microwave; 6. Hamburger.

One of the techniques used to produce edible animal meat made of skeletal muscle tissue is scaffold-based and appropriate for producing processed meats, such as hamburger or sausage.

In scaffold-based techniques, embryonic myoblasts or adult skeletal muscle satellite cells are proliferated, attached to a scaffold or carrier, such as a collagen meshwork or microcarrier beads, and then perfused with a culture medium in a stationary or rotating bioreactor. By introducing a variety of environmental cues, these cells fuse into myotubes, which can then differentiate into myofibers. The resulting myofibers may then be harvested, cooked, and consumed as meat [as seen on the above image.]

After these technical explanations, let’s return to the University of Maryland news release.

Scientists know that a single muscle cell from a cow or chicken can be isolated and divided into thousands of new muscle cells. Experiments with fish tissue have created small amounts of in vitro meat in NASA experiments researching potential food products for long-term space travel, where storage is a problem.

“But that was a single experiment and was geared toward a special situation - space travel,” says Matheny. “We need a different approach for large scale production.”

Matheny’s team developed ideas for two techniques that have potential for large scale meat production. One is to grow the cells in large flat sheets on thin membranes. The sheets of meat would be grown and stretched, then removed from the membranes and stacked on top of one another to increase thickness.

The other method would be to grow the muscle cells on small three-dimensional beads that stretch with small changes in temperature. The mature cells could then be harvested and turned into a processed meat, like nuggets or hamburgers.

The first research paper about future industrial production of cultured meat was published as a commentary by Tissue Engineering in its June 29, 2005 issue under the name “Commentary: In Vitro-Cultured Meat Production.” Here is a link to this paper (PDF format, 4 pages, 50 KB).

But this commentary was based on a longer paper, also named “In vitro cultured meat production,” and written in 2004. Here is a link to this full paper (PDF format, 27 pages, 290 KB). The illustration above and its legend come from this paper.

Now, Matheny has now decided to join New Harvest, “a nonprofit research organization working to develop new meat substitutes, including cultured meat — meat produced in vitro, in a cell culture, rather than from an animal.”

So when will we eat ‘cultured’ meat? I guess that many organizations around the world will carefully look at this kind of solution before approving or refusing it.

I’ m not sure to feel comfortable with this idea of ‘cultured’ meat. Please tell me if you’re ready for a synthetic steak.

Sources: University of Maryland news release, July 6, 2005; and various web sites

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In January 2005, a world’s premiere took place in a farm near Princeton, Minnesota. The event went largely unnoticed, except by the Princeton Union-Eagle in “Hydrogen fuel cell project at Princeton farm called world’s first.” Now, the Minnesota Department of Agriculture is celebrating the first hydrogen fuel cell powered by cow manure. The Haubenschild farm already was producing electricity from its cows, by using methane gas as the vehicle. But now, the farmers wanted to know if hydrogen fuel cells could produce enough electricity to power a farm and dubbed their effort the “cow power.” Read more…

Now, let’s go back to January 27, 2005 with the Princeton Union-Eagle.

Neither the public nor the cows likely knew why Haubenschild and two men from the University of Minnesota and a man from the Minnesota Department of Agriculture were celebrating last Friday with a cake and some champagne in a utility room on that farm.

What happened on Jan. 27, and what last Friday’s celebration was about, was that common cow manure was turned into electricity via a hydrogen fuel cell at the farm. The fuel cell stands about six foot high, is about the same length across and is at least a yard deep.

Phil Goodrich, the University of Minnesota principal investigator in the hydrogen fuel cell project at the Haubenschild farm, last Friday backed the assertion that this was a world’s first. The project was to see if running methane gas produced from cow manure into a hydrogen fuel cell could make electricity.

Now, let’s see the full process, from the cows to methane gas, and from hydeogen to electricity.

About five years ago Haubenschild and his two sons had already supplied the means of getting the methane production started at the farm. They completed a project with the help of the state to set up an anaerobic digester to turn cow manure at the farm into methane gas.

To make a long story short of how the chemical reactions take place, hydrogen that was in the methane is freed up inside the fuel cell. Hydrogen and oxygen end up on opposite sides of a series of plates coated with a proprietary 3M chemical.

Rich Huelskamp, the U of M technician handling the mechanical part of the project, explained that a voltage difference between the sides of the plates is created, causing electrons to flow. The electron flow is the electricity.

Now, do these hydrogen fuel cells produce enough electricity to power a farm? Here is the answer from the Minnesota Department of Agriculture.

University of Minnesota researchers have been able to run the fuel cell on biogas intermittently and are working towards running the fuel cell on biogas continually. The fuel cell is a proton electron membrane (PEM) and produces 5 kilowatts of electrical power. A fuel cell of this size is ideal for research purposes but not large enough to power the dairy or produce electricity for sale.

The farmer himself seems to disagree, according to the Princeton Union-Eagle.

Haubenschild said farmers like him can’t afford to subsidize consumers to buy energy from renewable sources by selling it for less than it cost to produce. He said it costs 5.1 cents per kilowatt hour to produce electricity from the fuel cell and Great River Energy will buy the surplus electricity from the fuel cell for four cents per KWH.

So will there be enough electricity for sale or not? Anyway, the farmers have even more ambitious projects.

Now Haubenschild is betting that perhaps the public could get interested in one of the newest waves in energy research — the hydrogen fuel cell. He even envisions selling tanks of the hydrogen fuel to gas stations where the public could buy the containers and hook them onto cars and trucks equipped with hydrogen fuel cells.

For more information about the previous innovations done at the Haubenschild Farms, you should visit this page about the Haubenschild Farms Digester, which contains links to other papers.

Finally, here is a link to Phil Goodrich’s current research about Advancing Utilization of Manure Methane Digester Electrical Generation.

Sources: Joel Stottrup, Princeton Union-Eagle, February 14, 2005; and various websites

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Do you want to use an economical and environmentally friendly biofuel? Just grow grass. Burning grass pellets will produce an energy-efficient biofuel, according to Jerry Cherney, a professor of agriculture at Cornell University. In this news release, “Grass as Fuel,” he says “Burning grass pellets makes sense; after all, it takes 70 days to grow a crop of grass for pellets, but it takes 70 million years to make fossil fuels.” Unfortunately, there is anything like a grass political lobby in Washington, so he might not be heard. But with current oil prices, more and more people will be tempted to use cheaper — and cleaner — sources of energy. Read more…

Here is the introduction of the Cornell University news release.

Grow grass, not for fun but for fuel. Burning grass for energy has been a well-accepted technology in Europe for decades. But not in the United States.

Yet burning grass pellets as a biofuel is economical, energy-efficient, environmentally friendly and sustainable, says a Cornell University forage crop expert.

This alternative fuel easily could be produced and pelleted by farmers and burned in modified stoves built to burn wood pellets or corn, says Jerry Cherney, the E.V. Baker Professor of Agriculture. Burning grass pellets hasn’t caught on in the United States, however, Cherney says, primarily because Washington has made no effort to support the technology with subsidies or research dollars.

Why is it important for environment?

Burning grass pellets makes sense; after all, it takes 70 days to grow a crop of grass for pellets, but it takes 70 million years to make fossil fuels,” says Cherney, who notes that a grass-for-fuel crop could help supplement farmers’ incomes.

Cherney points out that grass biofuel pellets are much better for the environment because they emit up to 90 percent less greenhouse gases than oil, coal and natural gas do. Furthermore, he says, grass is perennial, does not require fertilization and can be grown on marginal farmland.

Cherney recently presented his conclusions about grass biofuel at the Greenhouse Gases & Carbon Sequestration in Agriculture and Forestry conference, held March 21-24 in Baltimore.

You can find the abstract of his talk, “Grass Bioenergy in the Northeastern USA,” on this page. Just scroll a little bit or search for Cherney on the page.

If you’re interested in this subject, here is a link to the July 2004 issue of the “Dairy & Field Crops digest” (PDF format, 12 pages, 728KB). The article “Grass Management for Forage or Biofuel?” appears on pages 7 and 8.

In this article, Cherney argues that “grass is converted to useable heat at over 80% efficiency, with an energy output:input ratio exceeding 10:1, compared to other bioenergy sources with typicalsystem energy output:input ratios around 1:1.”

The cost-effectiveness of pelletized grass as a fuel results from:

• efficient use of low cost marginal farmland for solar energy collection
  
• minimal fossil fuel input use in field production and energy conversion
  
• minimal biomass quality upgrading which limits energy loss from the feedstock
  
• efficient combustion in advanced yet modestly priced and simple to use devices
  
• replacement of expensive high-grade energyforms in space and water heating

Cherney is convincing, but it’s hard to help him while living in Paris.

Sources: Cornell University News Service, March 31, 2005; and various websites

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I’m often impressed by some scientists’ ideas. But today, I’m a little bit worried, as researchers have genetically modified a common plant, the Indian mustard, to absorb more selenium, a toxic heavy metal found in soils polluted by irrigation wastewater. The transgenic plants were four times more efficient at swallowing selenium than natural ones in a contaminated area of California’s Central Valley, according to articles from Nature and Wired News. These field tests are only experiments, but the researchers also want to add genes to other plants to remove different toxic materials from soils, such as mercury. What would happen if such transgenic plants filled with dangerous chemicals start to crossbreed with natural ones? Or if an insect eats these plants before being eaten itself in the natural food chain, leading to some selenium in our food? Read more and tell me what you think…

Let’s start with the good news from the Nature article.

Genetically modified Indian mustard plants have successfully cleaned up excessive selenium in a California field. This is the first field trial for a pollution-busting transgenic plant, and it proves that the technology can work outside the laboratory, say the researchers who carried out the test.

Farmland in certain parts of California is heavily irrigated, and the water dissolves selenium in shale found in the region. As the water evaporates on the surface soil, selenium is concentrated to levels that are toxic to plants. But Indian mustard (Brassica juncea) has a natural resistance to the element, and absorbs it as it takes in water through its roots.

To increase the level of absorption of selenium by the Indian mustard plants, the researchers, led by Norman Terry, a plant biologist at the University of California, Berkeley, added extra genes to the plant. And here are the first field test results.

The researchers created three different strains of the transgenic mustard plants, each producing different enzymes to soak up selenium, and tested them in selenium-contaminated soils alongside wild-type Indian mustard. [And] hey found that the transgenic plants could accumulate up to 4.3 times as much selenium as conventional, wild-type Indian mustard.

The transgenic plants showed up to 80% of the growth expected in uncontaminated soil, whereas the wild-type plants had their growth halved by the selenium. They were harvested after 45 days in the field, but the researchers expect that longer growth periods could remove more selenium, and estimate that the most effective plants removed about 4.4% of the element in the top 25 centimetres of soil.

The process known as phytoremediation, which uses natural plants to remove toxic materials from soil, is not new, and is cheaper than traditional methods, which imply to remove polluted soil some place before burying it elsewhere. But it takes a long time, so adding genes to speed the process is an attractive solution. But what about the long term ecological impact?

The possibility of the transgenic plants crossbreeding with food crops is a worry, admits Clayton Rugh, a plant biologist at Michigan State University in East Lansing. “If you’re going to engineer a plant to take up high quantities of metals, you must ensure it doesn’t get into food crops,” he says. “They would have to be carefully contained with measures above and beyond those for genetically modified food crops,” he says.

Another source mentioned by Wired News also admits there are some dangers.

“We don’t know enough about the unintended effects of genetic engineering,” said Gurian-Sherman, senior scientist with the Center for Food Safety. The toxicity of plants can change, or a modified plant could interbreed with wild plants, he said. “What happens when an insect eats one of these plants, and then something else eats that insect?

On the contrary, Terry doesn’t seem concerned by the consequences of such experiments. Read carefully this quote from Nature.

In a useful spin-off, the Indian mustard plants could eventually be used as feed for cattle with insufficient selenium in their diet, says Terry. The team is now trying to boost the plants’ power even more. “We’d like to see increases in accumulation of 10 to 100 times that possible with wild-type plants,” says Terry. “This research is a great start.”

Let me summarize this. First, you add genes to a plant which will then easily absorb dangerous and toxic chemicals. Then you use these plants to feed cows. But why on earth a cow would need to ingest more selenium? And are you sure that you want this selenium in your plate?

I’m not an expert in this field, but these experiments look quite dangerous to me in the long term, especially if they become widespread.

By the way, the research work has been published by Environmental Science & Technology on February 1, 2005. Here is a link to the abstract of the paper called “Field Trial of Transgenic Indian Mustard Plants Shows Enhanced Phytoremediation of Selenium-Contaminated Sediment.”

Can we benefit from this or not? Please post your comments and tell me what you think.

Sources: Mark Peplow, Nature, February 11, 2005; Stephen Leahy, Wired News, February 12, 2005; and various websites

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It’s Sunday, so you have enough time for cooking. Why not trying a Mexican spicy dinner using some super hot jalapeño or habanero peppers? Too strong for you? No problem. Two years after creating mild jalapeño peppers, Texas pepper breeders have created a mild habanero pepper after 5 years of research. The New York Times reports that this mild habanero is available to growers and you’ll soon find it in grocery stores (free registration, but permanent link). As says Dr. Crosby, the plant geneticist who bred this habanero pepper, “It’s a pretty fruit. It’s got the flavor but it doesn’t kill you.” Read more before enjoying your meal…

Before going further, why this need for a mild habanero pepper?

With worldwide pepper consumption on the rise, according to industry experts, the new variety — a heart-shaped nugget bred in benign golden yellow to distinguish it from the alarming orange original, the common Yucatan habanero — is beginning to reach store shelves, to the delight of processors and the research station, which stands to earn unspecified royalties if the new pepper catches on.

“I love it,” said Josh Ruiz, a local farmer whose pickers this week filled some 200 boxes of the peppers to be sold to grocers for about $35 a box. “It yields good and I’m able to eat it.” As for the Yucatan habanero, he said, “My stomach just can’t take it.”

By comparison, if a regular jalapeño scores between 5,000 and 10,000 units on the Scoville scale of pepper hotness based on the amount of the chemical capsaicin (cap-SAY-sin), and a regular habanero averages around 300,000 to 400,000 units, A&M’s mild version registers a tepid 2,300, or barely one-hundredth of its coolest formidable namesake. A bell pepper, by the way, scores zero.

For more information about the Scoville scale, which was devised in 1912, you can read this page from Wikipedia, which tells us more about habanero peppers in this other page.

Now let’s look at how this mild habanero is grown at the Texas A&M Agricultural Experiment Station (TAM).

The process to produce a more palatable habanero, Dr. Crosby said, began with cross-breeding a regular hot variety with germ plasm from a wild heatless pepper from Bolivia. “We took pollen from the hot to pollinate the heatless to create a hybrid,” he said. The hybrid was then self-pollinated, fertilized with its own pollen, to inbreed desired qualities and then, Dr. Crosby said, “backcrossed to the hot to recover more of its genes for flavor.” That was repeated for eight generations, or four years at two growing seasons a year, to produce the TAM Mild Habanero.

And did you know there was an International Pepper Conference? The 17th conference was held last week in Naples, Florida, on November 14-16. And Dr. Crosby animated a discussion about “Breeding Peppers for Enhanced Beneficial Phytochemical Compounds.”

If you want to know more about his work, you can read “Texas plant breeder develops mild habanero pepper” (PDF format, 2 pages, August 2004).

Finally, I cannot conclude this column before giving you a recipe. What about some Habanero Pepper Sauce from Diana’s Kitchen?

Here is what you’ll need.

• 12 habanero peppers, stems removed, finley chopped
  
• 1/2 cup chopped onion
  
• 2 cloves garlic, minced
  
• 1 tablespoon vegetable oil
  
• 1/2 cup chopped carrots
  
• 1/2 cup distilled vinegar
  
• 1/4 cup lime juice

And here is your cooking assignment.

Saute the onion and garlic in oil until soft; add the carrots with a small amount of water. Bring to a boil, reduce heat and simmer until carrots are soft. Place the mixture and raw chiles into a blender and puree until smooth. Don’t cook the peppers, since cooking reduces flavor of the Habaneros. Combine the puree with vinegar and lime juice, then simmer for 5 minutes and seal in sterilized bottles.

But be warned if you’re using hot habanero peppers. This recipe is rated 9 on a scale of 1 to 10 by the author, B. Emert.

And now, bon appétit!

Sources: Ralph Blumenthal, The New York Times, November 21, 2004; and various websites

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