Intro to Cellular Agriculture: Grow a Meat Leaf!

Have you ever wondered how they make lab-grown chicken nuggets? Or maybe you've always dreamed of making your own Frankenfood. If so, get ready for a fun class where you will do it yourself and learn mammalian cell culture and aseptic technique along the way. We are performing a variation of the protocol in this cool YouTube video by The Thought Emporium. We'll go one step further into DIY territory by getting our meat cells directly from dissecting a chicken leg from the grocery store.

We will start with the process of decellularization. In the first class session you will remove the cells from a leaf and create a ghostly scaffold that will hold your meat cells. Then you will dissect out live cells from a grocery store chicken leg and put them in the CO2 incubator to multiply. In the second session we will seed the cells onto your leaf scaffold. In the final session we will visualize our meat leaves under the microscope (and cook them if you dare!).

We will be working in our fully-equipped lab with a biosafety cabinet, using pipettors and learning tons of lab skills along the way. But we will also go over how to set up your own DIY cell culture equipment and save money on supplies (did you know that you can dilute professional cell culture media with Gatorade to stretch it?).

This is a small, intense class with all lab supplies included. Space is limited so register early!

About the Instructor

Dr. Ellen Jorgensen has worked in the biotechnology industry for over 30 years. In the course of her long career she has worked with cells from chickens, hamsters and humans for her biomedical research. She cofounded the world;s first community lab and is a leader in the DIYBio movement. Ellen has taught hundreds of citizen scientists in community lab settings to use the tools of modern biotech. Her two TED talks (Biohacking: You Can Do It Too and What You Need To Know About CRISPR)have been viewed over 3 million times.

Host or Publisher Biotech Without Borders