Company Revives Woolly Mammoth—in Meatball Form

pcmag.com:

Ever wanted to eat a prehistoric extinct animal? An Australian startup has created a giant meatball made out of lab-grown woolly mammoth meat.

The project comes from a company called Vow, which has been developing lab-grown foods to help sustain the world’s appetite for meat. At a Tuesday event in Amsterdam, the startup debuted(Opens in a new window) the “Mammoth Meatball,” which weighs in at 400 grams (0.88 pounds).

Per its website(Opens in a new window), Vow created the meatball by taking a muscle protein called myoglobin that’s common in mammals and encoding the DNA sequence to match those of woolly mammoths. 

To identify the gene sequence, the startup relied on publicly available data obtained from actual deceased mammoth remains. However, the gene sequence contained some gaps, so Vow resorted to using the genome from African elephants to fill out the DNA sequence. 

The synthesized Mammoth Myoglobin gene was then inserted into muscle sheep cells. “We selected the successful cells that were producing the mammoth myoglobin and then continued to grow and multiply these cells, just like a mammoth would have done naturally,” the company added. In the end, over 20 billion cells were cultivated to create the giant meatball. 

The resulting product may not look appetizing, but the project is meant to show how lab-grown meat could replace farm-based agriculture to reduce humanity’s impact on the environment. Vow says not a single animal was killed in making the meatball. 

“The mammoth is a monumental symbol of loss and what drastic climate change can have as an impact. As the animal was unable to adapt to their ever-changing environment, we wondered if this giant could become a beacon of hope for the future of food,” the