Czech J. Food Sci., 2023, 41(6):406-418 | DOI: 10.17221/69/2023-CJFS

Microalgae in lab-grown meat productionReview

Arturo Nickolay Rojas-Tavara ORCID...¹, Alberto Jesus Donayre-Torres ORCID...^1,2*

¹ Department of Bioengineering, Universidad de Ingeniería y Tecnología (UTEC), Lima, Peru

² CentroBIO Research Center, Universidad de Ingeniería y Tecnología (UTEC), Lima, Peru

Reports have shown that meat production operations today contribute to the climate crisis, facilitating the occurrence of infectious diseases, and contributing to environmental pollution. Consequently, the public demands alternatives to traditional meat, such as in vitro manufactured meat. Several authors have suggested that improvements should be made in the manufacturing of cell-cultured meat to make a more sustainable and scalable process. They recently proposed using microalgae as a sustainable system to produce important nutrients such as oxygen from cellular waste molecules of animal cultures such as ammonia and carbon dioxide. In this review, we discuss recent advances of different microalgae applications in the production of lab-grown meat, with special emphasis on their use as a replacement for fetal bovine serum (FBS) or culture media, as well as its applicability as a source of cell oxygenation and waste upcycling to extend the life of animal cell cultures. Also, we discuss the implementation and limitations of these algae systems in large-scale in vitro meat manufacturing.

Keywords: chlorella vulgaris; co-culture; fetal bovine serum replacement; in vitro meat

Received: May 8, 2023; Revised: November 21, 2023; Accepted: November 27, 2023; Prepublished online: December 20, 2023; Published: December 28, 2023  Show citation