From Cell Line to Fillet: A Review of Biological and Engineering Strategies in Cultivated Seafood

ABSTRACT Due to the increasing world population, traditional commercial sources of protein will soon be insufficient to meet global nutritional demands. To address this and other anthropological effects, including carbon emissions, land and freshwater usage and overfishing associated with traditional agriculture, aquaculture and wild‐catch fisheries, cultivated meats have been proposed as a novel protein source, rather than animal slaughter. Currently, despite significant investment, the cultivated seafood industry is floundering to scale production. This is due to technological failures to adapt cells to suspension for integration into bioreactors, lack of appropriate scaffold materials and scalable techniques to support eventual product formation. To overcome these issues, it is crucial for the industry to choose methodologies and materials that are tailored to species‐specific cells to compensate for differences in the sensitivity and behaviour of cells within different bioreactor systems. Moreover, for regulatory approval and consumer acceptance, appropriate materials and edibility are required for selecting scaffolds. Ultimately, the cultivated seafood industry must address the current limitations in production efficiency to become a viable alternative food source. To do so, the industry should focus on using the recent advancements from both industry and academia including methods and technologies in tissue engineering and the adaption of cells to suspension. This review focuses on cultivated seafood as an alternative to aquaculture and wild‐catch fisheries and discusses the bottlenecks and potential solutions for the industry to upscale production.