ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Nutr.
Sec. Nutrition and Food Science Technology
Volume 12 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fnut.2025.1656960
This article is part of the Research TopicNovel Trends in Cultivated or Cultured Meat Research - Volume IIView all 3 articles
Bacterial Cellulose Scaffolds Derived from Brewing Waste for Cultivated Meat Applications
Provisionally accepted
- University College London, London, United Kingdom
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The negative externalities of conventional meat production along with rising global demand for meat are driving a search for sustainable alternative proteins. Cultivated meat (CM) is one such alternative, but a major hurdle for CM is the development of sustainable, edible and low-cost cellular scaffolds that can replicate the texture and structure of animal tissue. Bacterial cellulose (BC), a biopolymer produced by Komagataeibacter xylinus, is a promising scaffold material due to its biocompatibility, versatility and similarity to the extracellular matrix (ECM). However, the scalability of BC is limited by the high cost of conventional culture medium. This study explores the use of brewing waste, specifically brewers spent yeast (BSY) as an alternative, cost-effective and sustainable feedstock to produce BC for CM. BSY was found to be a feasible culture medium for BC production, resulting in BC with comparable structural, thermal and textural properties to that obtained with conventional culture medium. Additionally, the biocompatibility of BSY-derived BC was shown to support cell attachment and proliferation, with cell attachment after 24 hours of 35.9% ± 2.5% on BSY-derived BC. Our findings demonstrate that BSY can be effectively valorised to produce BC scaffolds for CM, offering a sustainable and scalable solution for future food production.
Keywords: cultivated meat, cellular agriculture, Alternative protein, 3D scaffold, Bacterial cellulose, Tissue Engineering, Cultivated meat production
Received: 30 Jun 2025; Accepted: 21 Aug 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Harrison, Gokoglan and Day. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Richard M Day, University College London, London, United Kingdom
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