A group of food scientists who are working to create lab-grown meat have found inspiration in an unlikely source: LEGOs. According to Food & Wine, researchers from Pennsylvania State University and the University of Alabama used LEGO components to create a device capable of improving the texture of the meat they were cultivating.
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Lab-grown meat is still very much in the development stages, and scientists are working on ways to improve the texture. Because cultured muscle cells don’t have any particular structure when they grow, the meat generally comes out resembling ground beef. That’s fine if you’re hoping to make more humane tacos, but it presents a challenge when trying to create, say, a lab-grown steak.
How Lego Helped Improve the Texture Lab-Grown Meat https://t.co/FVn1QMefbM researchers built an electro spinning device using lego to coax cells into growing into a scaffold for lab grown meat https://t.co/R5zlBhNfTo pic.twitter.com/CZcMeJ7rTc
— Stephanie (@stephaniekays) March 25, 2019
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This is where the toy bricks came in. Researchers used LEGO Power Functions to create an electrospinning device that was capable of turning starch fibers into a structured meat “scaffold.”
Read full, original article: Scientists Built a LEGO ‘Electrospinner’ to Improve the Texture of Lab-Grown Meat
