Project Info
Advancing Cultivated Meat Using Metabolic Modeling
Nanette Boyle
nboyle@mines.edu
Project Goals and Description:
The need to produce food more sustainably has lead to the development of the cultivated meat industry. Cell tissue culture techniques allow us to produce animal proteins in bioreactors instead of harvesting whole animals. There are some arguments that scale up of this process will also enable the production of food in a more carbon neutral manner than traditional agriculture. The Boyle Lab a suite of systems biology, metabolic modeling and bioprocess engineering techniques to help develop optimized cell media culture conditions for cultivated meat products. The main focus currently is procine (pork) but other sources of protein are also of interest.
We need students with different background and novel approaches work on this project. Students will work together with a graduate student mentor and be encouraged to attend regular meetings of the cultivated meat modeling consortium to learn more about the field.
More Information:
Grand Challenge: Not applicable.
https://gfi.org/
https://www.eatvow.com/
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37306528/
Primary Contacts:
Nanette Boyle nboyle@mines.edu
Student Preparation
Qualifications
Students should have wet lab experience unless they are interested in pursuing the computational side of the project. It would be ideal if the student has at least one of the following:
- Basic biology background
- cell culture knowledge
- python programming experience
- biochemistry
- bioreactor/bioprocessing
- interest in cultivated meat
TIME COMMITMENT (HRS/WK)
3-6 hours
SKILLS/TECHNIQUES GAINED
Basic biological lab techniques, cell culture, metabolic modeling, bioreactor use, genetic engineering
MENTORING PLAN
The student(s) will work under the supervision of a graduate student, attend group meetings and monthly meetings with the PI. Meetings will include training, development of project goals, troubleshooting experiments and data analysis.
PREFERRED STUDENT STATUS
Junior
Senior