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Do cellular and acellular agriculture hold the answer to producing highly functional and sustainable ingredients?
Do cellular and acellular agriculture hold the answer to producing sustainable ingredients?
Emilia Nordlund, D.Sc. (Tech.) heads VTT’s Food Solutions team, targeting more unrefined plant-based foods and developing new product and processing concepts for an efficient and sustainable future food chain.
Emilia Nordlund, D.Sc. (Tech.), Head of VTT Food Solutions
“Cellular agriculture refers to the use of single cell organisms or cell cultures for food production. People have usually heard of animal cell propagation techniques known more commonly as cultured or clean meat; however, cellular agriculture also covers other cell-based or microbial food production systems. Take for instance the use of cultured plant cells as fresh food, or the use of microbial organisms for single cell protein production and recombination of protein technologies. By fermentation, these techniques enable large-scale production of functional proteins, like animal proteins, in heterologous expression systems.”
“When the cells are used for food, like single cell proteins and plant cells, we can talk about cell-based food ingredients. On the other hand, when we harness the microbes to produce a certain protein or component and purify it from the cell mass and culture media, we talk about acellular food ingredients.”
“When we harness microbes and vertically scalable bioreactors for food use, we can clearly decrease the carbon footprint and land use of the food production. If we can provide alternatives for meat and animal-based products, the environmental benefits can be significant. For ethical reasons, giving up animal farming should be our final target. Cellular agriculture can also provide safer and more controllable production of food, as we are not dependent on climate and soil quality, and do not need to use antibiotics!”
