Plug-and-play cell engineering

Project aims

Cultivated meat relies on growing animal cells in large bioreactor tanks, but today’s muscle cell lines are still difficult and expensive to grow at scale. They often need costly ingredients, don’t grow well in suspension, and can’t easily be given new traits that would make production more efficient. To overcome these limitations, this project will build a new, easy-to-use genetic engineering platform specifically for bovine satellite cells, which are commonly used to make cultivated beef.

The team’s approach uses a type of molecular scissor system called a recombinase. They will create special “landing-pad” cell lines that act like docking sites for new DNA. These landing pads will allow researchers to insert large genetic elements quickly, accurately, and repeatedly, without disturbing the rest of the cell. This will make it much easier to test and combine useful traits.

With this ‘plug-and-play’ platform in place, they will engineer improved cell lines with features that directly support scalable cultivated meat production. First, they will add genes that help cells grow in suspension instead of needing surfaces to attach to, a key requirement for industrial bioreactors. Next, they will demonstrate other valuable traits, such as the ability to trigger muscle formation at the right time, or to make certain amino acids themselves rather than relying on expensive media components.

All engineered cell lines, DNA vectors, and protocols will be shared openly with the global research community. By providing a standardized, modular toolkit for genetic engineering, this project aims to accelerate innovation across the cultivated meat sector and help make the production of beef cells more efficient, affordable, and scalable.