Cellular agriculture
Cellular agriculture is the process of utilizing synthetic biology, cell line development, and protein engineering techniques to produce products that are traditionally harvested via farming, most notably proteins and fats for food products. In 2022, everything from pet food to dairy to gelatin is in the process of being produced without any animal farming.
Cellular agriculture provides a more sustainable food supply chain with dramatically lower emissions, land and water use, as well as flexibility for manufacturing locations. According to a study from Oxford University, “Cultured meat could potentially be produced with up to 96% lower greenhouse gas emissions, 45% less energy, 99% lower land use, and 96% lower water use than conventional meat”. As climate changes continues to affect food supply chains globally, cellular agriculture provides a location-agnostic sustainable option.
Additionally, cellular agricultural provides an ethical and humane alternative to factory farming as animals are not killed in the engineering process. As seafood consumption grows worldwide, overfishing also threatens animal welfare and delicate ecosystems. In 2022, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization estimated 34% of the world’s fish resources are overfished, a number that has been growing since the 1970s, when only 10% of fish populations were overfished.
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Cell Cultured Meat
Cell cultured meat is a product of cellular agriculture that uses biopsied animal cells to grow sustainable, humane meat as an alternative to the traditional farming industry. Because cell cultured meat is made with mammalian cells, many of the processes in developing and scaling a cell cultured meat product will mirror those in in biologics production, specifically cell line development.
Precision Fermentation
Cellular agriculture allows us to produce genuine animal proteins through microbial precision fermentation. Using synthetic biology techniques like strain engineering, scientists can engineer microbial cells as cellular factories for various organic molecules, most commonly proteins. In the food supply chain, precision fermentation is used to create everything from plant-based proteins from yeast cells to dairy- and animal-free whey protein from fungal strains.
Latest Resources
Resources for Cellular Agriculture
Application Note
CloneSelect Imager FL fluorescence for rapid day zero monoclonality
CloneSelect Imager FL fluorescence for rapid day zero monoclonality
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Detect endotoxin with the Kinetic-QCL Kinetic Chromogenic LAL Assay
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Monitoring for contaminants is a critical step during the production process in the pharmaceutical and medical device industries. A frequent contaminant, endotoxin, can cause fever,…
Application Note
Accelerating Gene Edited Cell Lines with the CloneSelect Imager FL
Accelerating Gene Edited Cell Lines with the CloneSelect Imager FL
Gene editing technology allows the manipulations at the DNA level where it is deleted, added, or modified using various tools.
Blog
Synthetic Biology Automation: Five Tips to Improve Your Molecular Cloning Process
Synthetic Biology Automation: Five Tips to Improve Your Molecular Cloning Process
One of the biggest global concerns is our excessive use of resources and its undeniable impact on the environment. In particular, manufacturing processes require enormous amounts of…
Blog
Lab Automation 101: Inside Access From Our Subject Matter Expert
Lab Automation 101: Inside Access From Our Subject Matter Expert
In life sciences, more is more. Obtaining a great body of data that is consistent and insightful to get a qualitative and quantitative overview of your model is critical. However,…
Application Note
A microfluidics-based, single cell printing and microplate imaging workflow optimized for efficiency, viability and monoclonality report generation
A microfluidics-based, single cell printing and microplate imaging workflow optimized for efficiency, viability and monoclonality report generation
In this app note, we demonstrate a unified workflow that combines single cell deposition and clonality verification. We couple the use of the SCP and CSI to deposit single cells into a…
Application Note
Improved productivity of cell line development using fully integrated automated solutions: a series of case studies with the CloneSelect Imager
Improved productivity of cell line development using fully integrated automated solutions: a series of case studies with the CloneSelect Imager
Cell line development requires screening tens of thousands of clones in order to find the few clones that are stable, grow well, and produce high yields of bioproduct. In addition to…