From Lab to Table? Development of a Meat-Rice Hybrid

Is it possible to create a plant-animal hybrid? An innovative scientific study developed a hybrid beef and rice food grown in a laboratory setting. 

In a fascinating fusion of science and cuisine, a team of innovative researchers have generated a lab grown creation that could revolutionize the future of food: a lab-grown meat rice hybrid. But is this a sustainable, nutritious, and tantalizing solution to feed a growing world population, or a toxic GMO Frankenstein? This article reports the details directly from the original scientific study and explores the process and implications of this innovative combination of science and cuisine. 

In this real biotechnology study, researchers actually grew meat in the lab. Still, this is not really a new thing. Lab-grown meats, although not yet a regular item on the supermarket shelves, are an active area of research and several lab grown meat products have been successfully generated in the past. But this study took it a step further, and combined lab grown meat with rice to create a plant and animal hybrid lab-grown food. Many people find the idea of genetically modified food products uncomfortable and would not be excited to see such a product on their plate. But are there any benefits to this cuisine? There may be a bigger purpose…

As the global population continues to expand, it's increasingly important to find reliable and sustainable food sources. Sustainability involves maximizing nutritional value of food while conserving resources and minimizing environmental impact. Meat is packed with proteins, fats, and nutrients, but raising animals for consumption takes up many resources and poses an increasing toll on the environment. Also, increasing demand for food and meat products raises considerable ethical issues with how humane practices can be maintained. One option is plant based alternatives to meat, which are already fairly commonplace, and might even be in your fridge right now. But in the future, plant based foods alone might not be enough. Other fascinating ideas for future foods include algae, insect derived proteins and 3d printed foods. But these options have challenges like ability to market to consumers, high cost to produce, unfamiliar taste, or unbalanced nutritional profile. But what if there were a way to get all the nutritional benefits of meat, without raising or slaughtering any animals? 

Plants, animals, and you, grow because cells are dividing and multiplying. In the lab, we can grow cells in an artificial environment: usually in a dish filled with nutrient rich fluids. A tiny sample of cells can multiply to form larger masses of tissues. This is the idea behind laboratory grown meats. You still need to start with an animal, but it doesn't necessarily have to die. A Small sample of cells can be taken from the animal and grown up in the lab to larger quantities: large enough for us to potentially eat and be satisfied. 

Still, just eating meat isn't all that balanced and healthy. That's why there's growing interest in hybrid foods that contain both meats and vegetables: all of the nutrients found in multiple food types, but packed into one food that takes up less space and resources. We can cross-cultivate different species of vegetables and fruits, and also some species of animals can be cross-bred, but what about somehow crossing an animal and a plant together? The researchers who wrote this scientific study came up with a creative way to create a hybrid food made up of beef and rice. Here's how they did it.

A grain of rice looks like just a solid kernel, but if we zoom in, it actually has a complex, intricate, porous structure, sort of like a sponge. Rice is made up of the molecules amylose and amylopectin; these molecules form growth rings in the grain in a semi-crystalline structure. This makes a rice grain suitable as a scaffold for cells: a structure that the cells can grow on and settle into. Various materials and jelly-like substances are often used in the lab to give cells a structure that they can attach onto and grow on, to help them develop into bigger masses. But using a grain of rice as a scaffold for cells to grow on is quite creative. 

The researchers mixed bovine, or cow, cells with rice grains, immersed them in a nutrient rich fluid, and allowed them to grow and infiltrate the rice. They used a type of bovine fat cell and a type of muscle cell. So, here, the formation of this hybrid did not take place at the genetic level, through cross-mating or somethin, and no DNA was changed. Rather, this was a physical paring of rice and beef at the cellular level. There was one thing though that they did to the rice grains before adding the cells. They coated the rice with a type of fish gelatin and an enzyme that is commonly used in the food industry. This nontoxic coating bound to the starch in the rice, and did a couple of things. First, it served to help maintain the structure of the rice grains, preventing them from breaking down and dissolving away as quickly. Second, this coating also helped the cells stick to the grains, enabling each grain to hold more cells. 

The researchers introduced two types of cells to the rice grains. They first used bovine myoblasts, a type of muscle tissue. They observed that the cells grew around 15% faster in the presence of the rice grains versus by themselves in the petri dish. This suggested that the rice itself actually may have provided some nutrients to the cells that enabled faster growth. They then introduced the cells directly to the coated rice grains, and allowed them to grow for around a week. Using microscopy they could observe that the cells truly had grown within the rice grains, and the intricate structures of these cellular networks. They observed that the muscle cells stretched along and organized within the rice grains. They also cultured adipocytes, or fat cells, within the grains. They then mixed the myocyte-rice and the adipocyte-rice to create their hybrid rice. Overall, they observed that the integration of animal cells appeared to change the measurable texture of the rice.The researchers noted that the cells took on a smooth organized appearance in the rice grains, forming a close cellular network within the grains. They also observed that this, what they called, “cell organized rice” was harder in texture than plain rice.

The researchers stated that the main objective of their study was to propose a new type of sustainable food that combines both animal cells and grains of rice. They successfully combined animal cells within the rice, but what about the actual nutritional value? The authors performed a comparison of the meat hybrid rice to just regular rice. Meat hybrid rice contained 0.16g more carbohydrates and slightly over 300mg more protein than plain rice. For comparison, 1g of beef brisket has around 180 milligrams protein. The researchers calculated that their meat-rice-hybrid has the added nutritional value of 1g of beef brisket as compared to plain rice. So basically, it’s like eating a serving of rice with a bite of meat on top. The fat increase of hybrid rice compared to plain was negligible, only about 10 milligrams. Why so little increase in fat if they were culturing fat cells in the rice? The researchers attributed this to insufficient maturation of the fat cells within the cell culture; more research into the culture of fat cells will be needed to substantially increase the fat content of the rice grains through cell culture. So for now, it seems there was only marginal carb and protein value that was added. Is it even worth all of the trouble? 

The researchers also looked at what type of proteins were present in the meat-rice-hybrid. They found over 3,000 proteins in the hybrid, of which 565 were identical to those found in beef. The researchers proposed that this means the meat-containing rice was over 18% identical to beef in terms of protein composition. This suggests that the nutritional profile of the rice-hybrid is more similar to beef than plain rice alone. The scientists propose that this hybrid is closer to serving as a “complete meal” than just eating plain rice. Also, let’s not forget cost. 

The researchers did some calculations to compare production costs and nutritional info for 1kg of either beef, plain rice, or hybrid rice. Although the protein and fat content of hybrid rice doesn’t come close to that of beef, it is slightly higher than that of plain rice, and contains carbohydrates, making it arguably a more balanced food than beef alone. Also, the time to produce it is comparable to that of plain rice: the time it takes to produce plain rice, plus one week or so of cell culture, basically. That’s quite improved over the time it takes to raise and farm cattle. Most striking is the cost differences. The authors claim that 1kg of hybrid rice could be produced for only 3 cents more than plain rice, which is far less than beef. But what about environmental impact? 

The authors calculated the CO2 emissions required to produce enough of each product to equal 100g of protein. They claim that the CO2 emissions released during the production of hybrid rice are not really any more than that needed to produce plain rice, and far less than beef. Of course, it’s important to remember that these are calculations based on the data the researchers collected in this small-scale experiment. Whether all of these numbers still hold up if production was substantially increased was not tested here directly. But before we go too far into mass producing this lab-grown meat rice, we haven’t discussed a very important factor…taste.

The researchers didn’t rely on their own senses for this; they used gas chromatography to study the exact odor of the rice. Odor is in large part responsible for flavor. They compared plain rice, adipocyte, or fat-cell-rice, and myotube, or muscular-beef-cell rice that had been steamed. Gas chromatography identifies compounds within a mixture. As compared to plain rice, fatty rice contained compounds associated with butter and oils, while muscle-cell-cultured rice contained molecules corresponding to flavors of beef and almond. So it would seem the flavor of the rice grain meat hybrids could vary perhaps depending on the type of cells used. The researchers didn’t really say directly whether or not they had tasted it, but they did hint in the conclusions that hybrid rice had a “rich flavor”. 

So in addition to relatively low production costs, sustainability, and perhaps improved flavor, with more research in this field and advancements in cell culture methods, perhaps the nutritional value could be further improved, for a true complete meal in one food product. But there’s one hurdle left perhaps to overcome…Would you eat a laboratory grown meat rice Hybrid?

Citation for the paper discussed in this article:

Park et al., Rice grains integrated with animal cells: A shortcut to a sustainable food system, Matter (2024)