Myoglobin has been grown in lettuce for the first time

An Imperial College team reports about 810 mg of the meat protein per kilogram of dry lettuce. Animal muscle still carries roughly ten times more.

A team led by Alexia Groff at Imperial College London has expressed myoglobin, the iron-carrying protein that gives red meat its colour and much of its flavour, in lettuce and in tobacco. The results, published in Frontiers in Plant Science this month, put the yield at approximately 810 mg per kilogram of dry weight in lettuce and 800 mg in tobacco. Animal muscle carries roughly ten times more.

The reason to care is a supply-chain one. Heme proteins are the expensive, hard part of making plant-based meat taste like meat; today they are typically produced by precision fermentation in bioreactors, which is capital-intensive and priced accordingly. Growing the same molecule in a leaf crop swaps a fermenter for a field. The researchers argue that plant cultivation is far more resource-efficient than livestock, and that plant-derived myoglobin could reach per-hectare protein yields rivalling animal agriculture with substantially lower water use and emissions.

That argument is reasoning, not a result, and the paper does not carry it. There is no cost per kilogram here, no extraction or purification yield, no scale beyond the growth chamber, and a tenfold gap to close against muscle. What has been demonstrated is that the molecule can be made this way at all. That is the first rung, and for SUSTENANCE it is the rung that has been missing.

Source: ScienceAlert