In Vitro Skeletal Muscle Tissue with Edible Hydrogel Toward Fabrication of Cultured Meat in Macroscopic Size

In this paper, we report a method to fabricate in vitro skeletal muscle tissue using edible hydrogel toward construction of macroscopic cultured meat. In the proposed method, we prepared a culturing device comprising two anchors placed on both sides of skeletal muscle tissue, which facilitate alignment of myocytes to the direction bridging the anchors. On each anchor, multiple nozzles are lined in a row, making an array of small-sized skeletal muscle tissues. Since the fabricated tissue along with the anchors is easy-to-handle, we achieved assembly of small-sized tissues to construct macroscopic skeletal muscle tissue. Moreover, since we achieved the formation of macroscopic tissue using only bovine blood plasma and calcium ions as edible hydrogel, proposed method will be applicable to form cultured meat at designed size by stacking the sets of skeletal muscle tissue with anchors.