3D Printing Cultured Meat
Understanding how to 3D print marbled meat
Jannis Wollschlaeger
Reutlingen University Smart Biomaterials Center, Germany
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Overview
Who: Jannis Wollschlaeger, Ph.D. student in biofabrication
When: 2019 – Present
Institutes: Reutlingen University Smart Biomaterials Center, Germany
Supervisors: Petra Kluger, professor of tissue engineering and biofabrication at Reutlingen University; Jan Frank, professor of food biofunctionality at the University of Hohenheim
Summary
Jannis is optimizing the process to 3D print meat. Like the ink in a standard printer, printing meat requires a bioink: composed of cells and materials for printing. Jannis is developing bioinks for printing fat and muscle, as well as a computer program to tell the printer how to mimic the composition of marbled meat.
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- H&E-stained native porcine (pig) muscle tissue. Nuclei appear blue, and the extracellular matrix & cytoplasm appear pink.
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- Porcine 🐽 🐷 adipose-derived stem cells differentiated into fat cells with lipid drops. (Red: Nile red stained; Blue: DNA stained with Hoechst 33342)
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- Jannis with the bioprinter he will use for 3D printing cultured meat 🖨 🥩
Why This Matters
Creating the 3D marbling of muscle and fat is a major challenge in moving cultured meat from burgers to steaks. Optimizing these bioinks and studying the natural structure of meat will allow 3D printers to recreate a marbled piece of meat.
