A unique spontaneously immortalised cell line from pig with enhanced adipogenic capacity - a foundational tool for cellular agriculture

Cultivated meat promises to address some of the pressing challenges associated with large-scale production of animals for food. An important limitation to realising such promise is the lack of readily available cell lines that can be expanded robustly for scale-up culture while maintaining the capacity to differentiate into tissues of interest, namely fat and muscle. Here, we report a porcine mesenchymal stem cell line (FaTTy) which, uniquely, upon spontaneously immortalisation acquired enhanced adipogenic efficiency, close to 100%, that has now been maintained for over 200 population doublings. FaTTy is able to differentiate with high efficiency in both 2D and 3D contexts as well as in the absence of serum, and produces mature adipocytes upon prolonged differentiation. Moreover, FaTTy adipocytes display fatty acid profiles largely similar to native pig fat but with higher monounsaturated-to-saturated ratios. FaTTy displays minor aneuploidy, characterised by lack of Y chromosome, and lacks typical genetic or functional properties of tumorigenic cells. These highly distinctive characteristics, together with its non-genetically modified nature, make FaTTy an extremely attractive, potentially game-changing resource for food manufacturing, and particularly cultivated meat.