A first stab at growing chicken breast

I think biology is interesting. I think genetics is pretty neat as well, and, if possible, I wouldn't mind trying to do something with cosimulation stuff from a biological perspective. Something that taps into the self sufficiency part of my passions is the artificial meat thing that has been going on. I live in an apartment, can't exactly raise chickens/cows/pigs. Wouldn't it be neat to have a little corner of my house dedicated to producing my protein needs on a weekly/monthly basis?

Weird side note on self sufficiency, if you ever wanted to have parts of the internet directly on your computer you could use this piece of software called Kiwix. It allows you to download a variety of sites directly onto your computer for offline use. It's free, and I am personally running Wikipedia(~102 GB) with pictures and python documentation(~2 GB). It's also nice to be able to be unplugged, and have access to sites that you feel are important.

I eat about a pound of chicken breast every week, so that would be my goal/requirements going into this. I would need to be able to produce 4 pounds of chicken breast tissue that I can cook and eat. As luck would have it, a couple of companies have been okay'd to produce chicken breast from cells (called cellular agriculture). So, it is possible to do, and I just need to figure out how.

The two companies that have been okay'd are Upside Foods, and Eat Just. Upside foods is taking stem cells, making them differentiate into the cells they want, and then putting it into a bioreactor to grow them. Eat Just's article mentions that they use a bioreactor that uses a fluid of salt, sugar, and amino acids. We now have a rough outline of what needs to be done, and the requirements help fill in any gaps and makes the problem simpler.

So far, the things set in stone that are needed are the chicken stem cells, bioreactor, salt, and sugar. With the amino acids there are so many that further details will be needed.

For the bioreactor we will be needing something that is considered 'specialized' for skeletal muscle tissue. AKA, probably expensive. It would be nice to be able to design our own, but let's get everything at the first step down before I pre-emptively optimize for the bioreactor.

Tangent, I feel marketing goes wrong when you start to focus on customer interpretations of actions, and how to impart interpretations with the use of language and associations. It feels like you can serve people like yourself with integrity, with a heavy customer focus, and are able to use marketing. If I were to solve this I would have to compromise the moment you start focusing on other people that you don't share first hand experiences with. I suppose an answer to this 'problem' would be to change who is in your company to reflect people that you want to serve. Alternatively is marketing research through the use of customer interviews, that would also increase the expense however. Anyway, just a random thought.

At this point we can roughly outline using SysML:

part def Cell;
part def ChickenBreastCell :> Cell;
part def StemCell :> Cell;
part ChickenStemCell : StemCell;
part def BioReactor;
part SpecializedBioReactor : BioReactor {
	in salt, sugar, aminoacids, cells;
	out cells;
	action GrowCells;
}
action def StemCellDifferentiation {
	in undif_cell : StemCell;
	out dif_cell : Cell;
}
action GrowChicken{
	action MakeChickenBreast : StemCellDifferentiation{
		:> undif_cell : ChickenStemCell;
		:> dif_cell : ChickenBreastCell;
	}
	action GrowChickenBreast {
		perform SpecializedBioReactor::GrowCells;
	}
}

Now comes the more nitty gritty part, having to look at research (or books) to understand how to expand on the processes just described. The main things I want further clarification on is the growing process (SpecializedBioReactor::GrowCells), how the stem cell can become a chicken breast cell (GrowChicken::MakeChickenBreast), how to transport (if needed) the chicken breast cell into the bioreactor, and just get some ball parks on costs and potential suppliers for the sugar, salt, amino acids, bioreactor, and chicken stem cells.

I saw a neat bioreactor that is growing chicken breast/muscle, and it used a lot of small tubes to transport the nutrients to the muscle. Apparently the nutrients can't get through the muscle cells, so you need to have something to transport it to help them grow better. Wasn't able to read the whole thing, but it is kind of neat [1]. There is another group that exercises the muscle, and seemed to have some good results. They did this with a magnetic field applied to the muscle to stimulate it, but it looks like it is a thin layer and not something you would see on a plate[2]. So, if I were to scale it I would have to keep that in mind. It seems that I would need to recreate the muscle as an organ, and not just the cells. A vascular system would be useful, so I would need to look into creating blood vessels (vasculogenesis) starting out and then how to perform blood vessel growth (angiogenesis). Being able to stimulate the muscles could be useful, so looking into how to grow and interact with motor neurons might be of value.

At this point, it is abundantly clear to me due to the complexity of this project that you won't be harvesting everything and starting from scratch over and over again. It would be best if there is something like a protected place that the muscle/vessels/neurons can grow out of, and then harvest the excess after a certain threshold. Because doing this stuff over, and over will be incredibly time consuming.

Next looking at how to differentiate chicken stem cells into chicken breast cells. Something cool I found is that you can pretty much get stem cells from the embryo of a chicken egg [3]. Which in hindsight is kind of a 'duh' moment, but it is nice that it is fairly straight forward. Embryonic stem cells differentiate into germ layers, we are interested in the mesoderm because it can be differentiated further as mesenchymal stem cells, which then can eventually become skeletal muscle. We will just say that it is by magic that the skeletal muscle becomes chicken breast for now.

As far as the transfer of cells into the bioreactor, it is going to depend. The specification of either process at this point is very coarse, and as a result creating a protocol or something to transfer the cell culture to the bioreactor that isn't specified is probably not the best use of time at the moment. To be returned to once differentiated cell culture, and bioreactor design is well defined.

Why are bioreactors so expensive. To get something that is called a bioreactor costs at least a thousand dollars, and goes up from there. That's for the simple stuff too. None of the ones I'm looking at are specialized. Wow. Looks like we will be designing our own. Since I intend to put the chicken in my mouth and eat it, I think I am going to stick with food grade products if at all possible. So table salt, organic (probably) sugar, and I think I am going to be in trouble with amino acids. I don't even know which ones are going to be of use, so I need to find out what amino acids are used by the various cells at different stages of differentiation. They seem fairly expensive, and might be the thing that tanks the cost [4]. Something I need to think about later down the line is the food testing. So I make the chicken breast, but can I test if it is edible without eating it?

For next steps I feel like I still need to refine what I think is going to happen at a conceptual level. I need to better understand bioreactor design, and stem cell differentiation inputs. It would be nice to come across some simulation stuff that I could use to model interactions. So, maybe bioreactor modeling with various types/compositions of cells?

[1] https://www.cell.com/trends/biotechnology/abstract/S0167-7799(25)00085-X

[2] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1742706115300052?via%3Dihub

[3] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41587-025-02833-3

[4] https://phytotechlab.com/biochemicals/amino-acids.html