Overview
Cellular agriculture can be applied to seafood production to reduce our dependence on commercial fishing, which threatens the health of oceans and marine life.1 Why, then, is seafood so underexplored compared to land-based meat?
Prior to this initiative, no public literature explored marine applications of cellular agriculture. We consolidated all of the technical reasons why seafood is uniquely suited for cell culture into a peer-reviewed paper to advance further research about cell-based seafood.
We discovered that fish cell culture research is underfunded and opportunity-rich for novel research.
Our peer-reviewed publication outlines why seafood is uniquely suited to cell culture and what research can most rapidly advance the field.
As of April 2021, the preprint and peer-reviewed paper have a combined 22,000 views, 3,300 downloads, and nine citations.2
1https://ourworldindata.org/seafood-production#the-world-now-produces-more-seafood-from-fish-farms-than-wild-catch
2Metrics aggregated from here and here.
Updates
June, 2019 – Peer-reviewed publication is published open access in Frontiers in Sustainable Food Systems.
November, 2018 – Preprint publication is published online.
May, 2018 – New Harvest decides to write a paper about cell-based seafood. From the beginning, we commit to publishing open access in order to maximize impact and public understanding about cellular aquaculture.
Collaborators
This work was funded by an anonymous donor.
The publication was authored by Natalie Rubio,3 Isha Datar,4 David Stachura,5 David Kaplan,3 and Kate Krueger.4
3Department of Biomedical Engineering, Tufts University
4New Harvest
5Deparment of Biological Sciences, Chico State University
See More Initiatives
Safety Roadmap for Cultured Meat
Because growing meat through cell culture is so novel a process, many questions about the safety of cell-cultured meat and seafood products remain unanswered.
This industry-wide initiative was designed in partnership with Vireo Advisors to begin a data-driven conversation about the safety of cultured meat. 50 leading companies shared previously unpublished details about their manufacturing processes which we used to create a body of publicly available information about how cultured meat is produced and what safety hazards might be introduced along the way.
Open Source Bioreactor
We are building a low cost, open source modular bioreactor for in vitro tissue culture to increase global access to cellular agriculture research tools. The project is a collaboration between New Harvest and the Institute for Development of Advanced Applied Systems (IRNAS) in Slovenia.
Consumer Perception of Cellular Agriculture
Consumer acceptance is key to realizing the potential benefits of cellular agriculture.
New Harvest, in partnership with the Environmental Law Institute, assembled the first American focus group to understand public attitudes about cellular agriculture and cultured meat. The two focus groups interviewed as part of this initiative provide an important qualitative perspective on how the public weighs the potential benefits and risks of cultured meat and cellular agriculture.