Growing meat on vegetables: plants with natural biomimetic micro-patterns as edible meat-engineering scaffolds

Cultured meat needs edible bio-scaffolds that provide not only an appropriate growth milieu for muscle and adipose cells, but also biomimetic microstructures to sculpt tissue architecture. Current meat-engineering technologies struggle to achieve scalable cell production, efficient cell differentiation, and tissue maturation in one single culture system. Here we propose a simple strategy to transform common vegetables into muscle- and adipose-engineering scaffolds, without undergoing conventional plant decellularization. We selected vegetables with natural anisotropic and isotropic topology mimicking muscle and adipose tissue microstructures respectively. We further adjusted vegetable stiffness by autoclaving to emulate the mechanical characteristics of animal tissues. Our selected anisotropic Chinese chive and Shiitake mushroom stem supported the scalable expansion of murine myoblasts and porcine myosatellite cells, and improved cell alignment and subsequent myogenesis. We also chose loofah with isotropic topology to construct lipid-containing fat tissues. Our cultured muscle and fat tissues can be assembled into meat stuffing or layered meat chips. Our results highlight naturally micro-patterned vegetables, without needing decellularization, as promising meat-engineering scaffolds. These edible biomaterials are simple to fabricate, low-cost, and possess tissue-mimicking topology and stiffness. Vegetable scaffolds may see broad applications in the bio-fabrication of meat analogs, muscle-powered robots, and transplantable tissue patches.