Curved Culture Surfaces
Curved surfaces improve muscle cell alignment
Ricardo Gouveia
Newcastle University, United Kingdom
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COMPLETED
Overview
Who: Ricardo Gouveia, Postdoctoral scholar
When: 2018 – 2020
Institutes: Newcastle University, United Kingdom
Supervisors: Che Connon, professor of tissue engineering at Newcastle University
Summary
Ricardo is testing the use of curved surfaces to culture myoblasts, which may encourage the cells to self-organize into the structure of muscle. This could be a simple and cost-effective way to form muscle tissues that have the natural texture of meat.
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- Ricardo at New Harvest’s 2019 lab meet in Brooklyn.
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- A new Tower of Babel 🤔 Ricardo’s first batch of curved surfaces are allowing him to investigate previously untested cell culture conditions and generate a massive amount of data on the biology of muscle cells. These are custom-made borosilicate glass half-pipe surfaces he used to test the impact of substrate curvature on muscle cell behavior. They have different diameters to test which curvature best helps cells achieve optimal growth.
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- Juicy, structured meat fresh from the lab! Structured (on left in both pics) vs. unstructured (on right) muscle tissue. Both were cultured in vitro, but the structured was grown on curved surfaces which induce cells to align and form highly organized tissues 😋
Why This Matters
Current strategies to create the intricate texture of meat rely on costly setups with limited ability to scale. Ricardo’s strategy is a simple and cheap way to control the alignment of muscle cells.
Outcomes
Ricardo’s work led to an open access publication in Advanced Sciences, “Milliscale Substrate Curvature Promotes Myoblast Self-Organization and Differentiation”. This study found that curved surfaces, compared to flat (or planar) surfaces, promoted myoblast differentiation and alignment. As a result, the tissues produced on curved surfaces were more dense and similar in structure to muscle. This study supports curved surfaces as an inexpensive tool to scale cultured meat production. The results of this project inspired Ricardo’s second project on macromolecular crowding.
To find out more about this project, listen to our podcast where we talk to Ricardo about his discoveries relevant to areas as diverse as healthcare, bio-manufacture and food.
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