Meatball From Long-Extinct Mammoth Created By Food Firm

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Guardian: A mammoth meatball has been created by a cultivated meat company, resurrecting the flesh of the long-extinct animals. The project aims to demonstrate the potential of meat grown from cells, without the slaughter of animals, and to highlight the link between large-scale livestock production and the destruction of wildlife and the climate crisis. The mammoth meatball was produced by Vow, an Australian company, which is taking a different approach to cultured meat. There are scores of companies working on replacements for conventional meat, such as chicken, pork and beef. But Vow is aiming to mix and match cells from unconventional species to create new kinds of meat. The company has already investigated the potential of more than 50 species, including alpaca, buffalo, crocodile, kangaroo, peacocks and different types of fish. The first cultivated meat to be sold to diners will be Japanese quail, which the company expects will be in restaurants in Singapore this year. [...] Vow worked with Prof Ernst Wolvetang, at the Australian Institute for Bioengineering at the University of Queensland, to create the mammoth muscle protein. His team took the DNA sequence for mammoth myoglobin, a key muscle protein in giving meat its flavor, and filled in the few gaps using elephant DNA. This sequence was placed in myoblast stem cells from a sheep, which replicated to grow to the 20 billion cells subsequently used by the company to grow the mammoth meat. "It was ridiculously easy and fast," said Wolvetang. "We did this in a couple of weeks." Initially, the idea was to produce dodo meat, he said, but the DNA sequences needed do not exist. Tim Noakesmith, cofounder of Vow, said: "We chose the woolly mammoth because it's a symbol of diversity loss and a symbol of climate change." Bas Korsten at creative agency Wunderman Thompson added: "Our aim is to start a conversation about how we eat, and what the future alternatives can look and taste like. Cultured meat is meat, but not as we know it." No one has yet to taste the mammoth meatball, notes the report. "We haven't seen this protein for thousands of years," said Wolvetang. "So we have no idea how our immune system would react when we eat it. But if we did it again, we could certainly do it in a way that would make it more palatable to regulatory bodies."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.