The Science of Alt Protein: Deconstructing bovine myogenesis for cultivated meat applications
Event description
Livestock farming and conventional meat production pose significant environmental, health, and animal welfare challenges. In seeking sustainable alternatives, cultivated meat technology utilizes in vitro differentiation of myogenic progenitor cells (MPCs) into muscle cells for meat derivation. However, understanding the molecular determinants governing MPC differentiation into muscle cells, and the potential enhancement of this process through modulation of signaling pathways, remains limited.
At this seminar, Dr. Ori Bar-Nur, Professor at ETH Zurich and GFI grantee, will share recent efforts to dissect the molecular landscape controlling bovine myogenesis in vitro, and how he and his colleagues explored its augmentation by small molecules, collectively reporting a medium that increases MPC differentiation compared to conventional methods. Through bulk and single-cell transcriptomics and proteomics, they documented that the enhanced medium elicited MPC de-differentiation into unique cell populations, while simultaneously forming contractile fibers expressing wide arrays of differentiation markers, significantly resembling myogenesis in vivo. The optimized method for muscle generation and the corresponding molecular roadmap may prove helpful for in vitro meat production.
Meet the speaker
Ori Bar-Nur, Ph.D.
PROFESSOR OF REGENERATIVE AND MOVEMENT BIOLOGY
ETH ZURICH
Professor Ori Bar-Nur received his Ph.D. with distinction in 2012 from the Hebrew University and completed his postdoctoral training at Harvard University in 2018, both in stem cell biology. Since 2018, he has served as a tenure-track Assistant Professor in the Department of Health Sciences and Technology at ETH Zurich.
The primary long-term goal of his laboratory is to develop stem cell-based therapeutic approaches to treat muscle diseases. To this end, his lab utilizes direct reprogramming approaches to convert somatic cells into regenerative-competent muscle stem cells suitable for potential therapies. Given the lab’s expertise in myogenic cell line cultivation, his research group further explores means to reduce the costs of cultivated meat production through generation of unique muscle stem cell lines from domesticated animals for cultivated meat applications.
Dr. Bar-Nur has been awarded several prestigious grants, including the Swiss National Science Foundation Eccellenza grant in 2020. In recent years, his lab has published prominent works in the stem cell field in leading scientific journals.
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