1.
Harvest muscle tissue from a sedated or recently slaughtered animal. Make sure to gather muscle from an area close to the bone.
2.
Using a microscope, seperate out myosatellite cells from the normal muscle cells. Myosatellites are halfway between a stem cell and a fully differentiated cell. Stems cells are ‘undecided’ and can become anything, whereas satellites cells can only become one kind of cell. Myosatellites are found all over the body, ready to turn into adult muscle cells in case of injury. Myosatellites are particularly useful for in vitro meat, because they not only ‘want’ to become muscle, they’re also able to rapidly proliferate – which you’ll need for the next step.
3.
Place each myosatellite cell in a petri dish and bathe it in a suitable nutrient solution supplemented with fetal bovine serum. Derived from the blood of unborn calves, this serum is the standard solution for growing healthy cells, although algae-based alternatives are becoming possible. After three weeks, each myosatellite cell will have produced several billion additional cells.
4.
Place your cells in a nutrient poor growth medium. This essentially ‘starves’ the cells, forcing them to differentiate into fully developed muscle cells, also called myocytes or muscle fiber.
5.
Given enough time, your muscle cells will naturally align and link together to form myotubes. Myotubes are primitive muscle strands that are only 0.3 millimeters long.
6.
Wrap several myotubes around a dab of gel in a new petri dish. At this phase, exercise is crucial to your developing meat. A quality bioreactor will cycle through phases of warmth and coldness effectively ‘excercising’ the cells.
After additional few weeks, the myotubes will have merged together to form a long, column-shaped fascicle. Congratulations! You now have true muscle tissue.
7.
Remove the hoop of muscle tissue from its gel hub. Slice the hoop open and flatten it to form a single straight strand.
8.
Repeat steps one through seven another 19.999 times.
Combine all 20.000 fascicles into a single hamburger patty. Season the patty to taste with salt and pepper. Pan-fry the patty and serve with French fries and a pickle.
