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National University of Singapore (NUS) food scientists have developed a simple and scalable method for culturing pork fat tissue using protein scaffolds made from secalin, a protein extracted from rye.

Cellular agriculture offers a sustainable alternative to conventional meat production but faces significant technological challenges. One key technical bottleneck for the large-scale commercialization of cultured meat is the lack of edible and functional scaffolds that meet requirements for scalability, cost and safety.

A research team led by Professor Huang Dejian from the NUS Department of Food Science and Technology discovered that rye secalin, an abundant crop protein, is suitable for edible scaffolding materials. They invented a template-leaching method for making scaffolds from secalin. This process is fully food-grade, cost-effective and sustainable, producing secalin scaffolds with high porosity and ideal mechanical rigidity for pork fat cell growth.

The research findings were published in the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry.

This patent-pending technology overcomes the bottlenecks of scaffold manufacturing in terms of cost, functionality and scalability. The discovery presents a new direction for the cellular agriculture sector.

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