MANY MINDEDAustralian team turns meat waste into cheaper protein feed for lab-grown meat
University of Queensland researchers created a closed-loop system to grow Chlorella BDH-1 microalgae using waste material from cultivated meat production. The algal lysate replaces expensive amino acids and animal serum in cell-cultured protein growth media, cutting media costs by 60-90% according to their calculations. When combined with mammalian cells under specific conditions, this approach improved muscle cell growth by 40%. The research, published in *Food Research International*, used waste from Magic Valley (a Melbourne-based cultivated meat startup) for testing. Vow secured human-use approval for cultured quail proteins in Australia and has completed a tonne-scale production run for cultivated duck on a 22,000-litre line.
The mechanism relies on converting cultivated meat byproducts into a cost-effective algal feedstock. This reduces dependency on animal serum—a major expense in cell-cultured protein production—while enabling higher cell growth rates. However, scaling this process faces hurdles: spatial separation of cells, oxygenation decoupling, and light delivery systems prevent sufficient microalgal biomass for commercial lysate production.
This advancement could lower costs for lab-grown meat globally by reducing the most expensive input (growth media), potentially expanding access to affordable protein. But the 60-90% cost savings apply only to media, not total production. The 40% muscle cell growth improvement requires precise algal-co-cultivation conditions, meaning real-world scalability remains limited.
What to watch: Overcoming co-cultivation engineering barriers. Caveats: Algal lysate performance exceeds standard media by over twofold only under specific conditions; scale-up challenges inhibit sufficient biomass production for commercial use.
Source: Green Queen