In Tokyo, researchers have created the world’s largest, and most advanced, lab-growth chicken nugget.
Featuring “veins” that deliver nutrients and oxygen, the new nugget marks a breakthrough in the race for lab-grown meat, which has struggled to make thicker, more cohesive cell groupings that better mimic meat’s muscle structure.
The team also broke the record in size, creating a nugget of about a third of an ounce—believed to be the largest produced to date, according to a paper published in the journal Trends in Biotechnology.
The scientists developed a bioreactor that mimicked a circulatory system, using 50 hollow fibers acting like veins to distribute nutrients and oxygen to the meat, keeping cells alive and guiding them to grow in the specified directions.
“It’s exciting to discover that these tiny fibers can also effectively help create artificial tissues,” Shoji Takeuchi, a co-author of the study and a professor at the University of Tokyo in Japan, said in a statement. The new approach, he said, could be a scalable way to produce whole-cut cultured meat.