Meatball from extinct mammoth created in lab

A meatball created with the flesh of an extinct mammoth has been created by an Australian company to raise awareness about the potential of lab-cultured meat.

Who created the mammoth meatballs

The mammoth meatball was created by Vow, an Australian company that has already explored the lab-grown potential of meats like alpaca, buffalo, crocodile, kangaroo, peacocks and different types of fish.

The company worked with Prof Ernst Wolvetang at the Australian Institute for Bioengineering at the University of Queensland, to create the mammoth muscle protein. In a process that readers will be familiar with thanks to a certain dinosaur movie franchise, scientists took the DNA sequence for mammoth myoglobin, a key muscle protein in giving meat its flavour, and filled in the gaps with elephant DNA. The sequence was then inserted in myoblast stem cells from a sheep, which replicated to grow to the 20 billion cells needed to grow the mammoth flesh.

Promoting lab-cultured meat

The mammoth meatball is merely an exhibition piece and you won’t find it on the menu any time soon.

“We chose the woolly mammoth because it’s a symbol of diversity loss and a symbol of climate change,” Tim Noakesmith, cofounder of Vow told The Guardian.

The experiment is bound to raise all kinds of ethical questions, which is what it was designed to do. However, no one has yet tasted the meatball as it is not intended for human consumption.

“We haven’t seen this protein for thousands of years,” said Wolvetang. “So we have no idea how our immune system would react when we eat it. But if we did it again, we could certainly do it in a way that would make it more palatable to regulatory bodies.”

Vow is planning on rolling out a cultivated Japanese quail meat, which is expected to hit Singapore restaurants later this year. 

“We have a behaviour change problem when it comes to meat consumption,” said George Peppou, CEO.

“The goal is to transition a few billion meat eaters away from eating [conventional] animal protein to eating things that can be produced in electrified systems.

“And we believe the best way to do that is to invent meat. We look for cells that are easy to grow, really tasty and nutritious, and then mix and match those cells to create really tasty meat.”