Scientists Cook Comically Tiny Lab-Grown Hamburger

A team of scientists at UCLA have cracked the code on how to scale up the creation of lab-grown meat, potentially paving the way for mass production of the green alternative.

We can't help but feel like we're missing out on something when we look at the burger patty, which is barely bigger than a quarter, and it's cute.

A new particle created by the team allows cultured meat to have a more natural texture.

The team argues in a new paper that these muscle cells could make it more feasible to grow these structures into larger tissues and that they could also make the process cheaper and quicker.

Rowat said that animal cells that can be coaxed to form tissues similar to meats could offer aprotein source to a world facing food insufficiency due to threats ranging from epidemics to natural disasters.

Producing cultured meat at scale for food production has proved to be more difficult than scientists have previously been able to.

Strategies to enable mass production are still emerging, and cultured meat products are not yet on the market in the US.

The process of growing a scaffold of animal tissues is very time consuming and costly. Companies have tried to grow cells in large bioreactors but the resulting meat doesn't have the same texture as the real thing.

Rowat and her team came up withedible microcarriers that can provide the structure and texture of real meat. Using ingredients such as transglutaminase, a "meat glue" that's commonly used as a binding agent, the researchers built special microcarriers into grooves that later grew into clumps.

One of Rowat's students said that they were excited to see a trend toward quicker growth of muscle cells. The cost of cultured meat production can be reduced when cell culture time is reduced.

There is still a lot of work to be done. Microtissues, which were formed into a cohesive meat product, melted into a brownish puddle when cooked for just under nine minutes on a hot griddle.

The scientists are happy with the work.

The growing of large amounts of muscle tissue in a stirred bioreactor is a major step in upscaling the production of cultured meat.

It's a tiny hamburger patty, but a huge potential hamburger for mankind.

Scientists are bringing cultured meat to your kitchen table.

There's more on cultured meat. Lab-grown meat can often contain real blood.