A meatball has been made from the recreated flesh of the long-extinct woolly mammoth as part of a project to demonstrate the potential of growing flesh
from cells.
The mammoth snack was produced by an Australian company called Vow which is aiming to uses cells from unconventional species to create new kinds of meat.
Vow’s project doesn’t involve the slaughter of animals and highlights the link between large-scale livestock production and the destruction of wildlife and the climate crisis.
The company has already explored the potential of more than 50 species, including alpaca, buffalo, crocodile, kangaroo, peacocks and different types of fish.
Tim Noakesmith, who cofounded Vow, told The Guardian: “We chose the woolly mammoth because it’s a symbol of diversity loss and a symbol of climate change.”
Woolly mammoths are thought to have become extinction due to hunting by humans and the warming of the world after the last ice age.
Vow worked with Professor Ernst Wolvetang, at the Australian Institute for Bioengineering at the University of Queensland, to recreate the mammoth muscle protein.
Professor Wolvetang’s team took the DNA sequence for mammoth myoglobin, a key muscle protein which gives meat its flavour, and filled in the gaps using DNA from an elephant.
This sequence was placed in myoblast stem cells from a sheep, which replicated to grow to the 20 billion cells which were used by the company to grow the mammoth meat.
“It was ridiculously easy and fast,” said Professor Wolvetang. “We did this in a couple of weeks.”
The professor said the initial idea was to produce dodo meat but the required DNA sequences didn’t exist.
Despite the work which has gone into it, nobody has yet had the honour of being the first person to eat a mammoth meatball.
“We haven’t seen this protein for thousands of years,” said Professor…
