According to the CNN report – Australian startup, Vow, has created a mammoth meatball. With an aim of highlighting the potential of cultured meat to promote a more eco-friendly approach to eating. On Tuesday, the meatball will be displayed at the Rijksmuseum Boerhaave, a science and medicine museum in the Netherlands.
James Ryall, Vow’s chief scientific officer said, “We need to start rethinking how we get our food. My biggest hope for this project is … that a lot more people across the world begin to hear about cultured meat,”
The scientists who worked on the project didn’t have access to frozen mammoth tissue. Hence, they turned to a protein called myoglobin to create the meat’s texture, color, and taste. They found the DNA sequence for mammoth myoglobin in a public genome database. They used information from an African elephant genome to fill in any gaps.
We’re not selling it as a product
After synthesizing the gene, they inserted it into a sheep muscle cell. Which they then grew in a lab. The team was ultimately able to produce roughly 400 grams of mammoth meat.
Ernst Wolvetang, a professor and senior group leader at the Australian Institute for Bioengineering and Nanotechnology at the University of Queensland said, “From a genomic point of view, it’s only one gene amongst all the other sheep genes that is mammoth.It’s one gene out of 25,000.” He is part of this project.
According to Ryall, they normally taste products and experiment with them. But they were cautious about trying it right away. They believe they are dealing with a protein that hasn’t existed for 5,000 years. He said, ‘’ We don’t know if this protein has any potential allergenicity.”
“That’s why we’re not selling it as a product,” he continued. “We don’t know the safety profile of this specific product.”
