Self-Renewing Pig Fat Cell Line from Roslin Institute Could Resolve Key Bottleneck in Cultivated Meat Sector
Researchers at the Roslin Institute, part of the University of Edinburgh, have developed a line of self-renewing pig fat cells that could support large-scale cultivated meat production by enabling consistent, efficient generation of fat tissue without genetic modification. The cells, designated as FaTTy, are derived from early-stage pig stem cells and exhibit the rare ability to both proliferate indefinitely and reliably differentiate into fat cells. This capacity addresses a long-standing technical barrier in cultivated meat production, where most animal stem cells lose their ability to develop into fat cells over time, making scalable fat production difficult. “These cells not only grow indefinitely but also retain their ability to become fat at such high efficiency—something we have never seen before in livestock stem cells. It opens …
