Synthetic meat, Australian company creates mammoth meatballs

The latest news in the field of synthetic meat? There mammoth meatball. Vow, an Australian company, started from a sequence of DNA from the extinct animal 10 thousand years ago to get this “preparation”. But it cannot be eaten. So why was it created?

Why the mammoth meatball?

The company has already studied the potential of beyond 50 specieincluding alpacas, buffaloes, crocodiles, kangaroos, peacocks and fish. But we started with the mammoth, explained the company, precisely because of what it represents in the collective imagination. This relative of the elephant, second Vow, would be an animal symbol of the loss of diversity and climate change.

Why can’t you eat mammoth meatballs? There are no studies about it, i.e. we don’t know what impact it can have its protein on the human being. “We have not seen this protein for thousands of years – explained the professor Ernest Wolvetang of the Australian Institute for Bioengineering in an interview with The Guardian – so we have no idea how our immune system would react when we eat it.”

All this makes us understand how the animal was also chosen somewhat as a provocation. “The goal is to push a few billion meat eaters from eating animal protein to consuming foods that can be laboratory products”, he in fact explained George PeppouCEO of Vow.

How the meatball was made

To produce the mammoth meatball, which from the images is almost as big as a bowling ball, the team of scientists started from the DNA sequence of the myoglobin. It is a muscle protein that gives meat its distinctive flavor.

However, elephant DNA was also used for this operation. And the sequence was then inserted into sheep myoblasts. Here the stem cells have replicated up to 20 billion and then used to produce meat. Did it take many years to make? Actually no, scientists have spoken of an easy job and of only two weeks.