World’s First 3D Printed WAGYU BEEF Revealed – With Marbling Like The Real Deal

The world’s first 3D printed Wagyu beef has been revealed by scientists, who say it has mottling “like the real thing” and is grown from stem cells in the lab.

Most of the “cultured” meats produced so far come in the form of ground meat rather than steak, made up of simple muscle fibers rather than more complex structures.

However, the steaks – especially those from the delicate Waygu beef – contain fat, muscle, and blood vessels in a complex structure producing a marbled effect, and this is what the Osaka University team did. could reproduce using 3D printing techniques.

“This work can help usher in a more sustainable future with widely available cultivated meat,” which is closer to existing products, says study author Dong-Hee Kang.

The team gave no indication of the possible cost of producing the steaks or how long it would take for the product to reach the market.

Scroll down for video

Wagyu can be translated as “Japanese cow” in English and is one of the most famous meats in the world for its high content of “intramuscular fat” and marbling.

It is this marbling effect that provides the rich flavor that also makes it one of the more expensive steaks on the market.

However, current livestock husbandry techniques are seen as unsustainable, especially in terms of climate change emissions, leading to increased demand for plant-based alternatives and research into meat products grown as this one.

“The ‘cultured meat’ currently available is made up of poorly organized muscle fiber cells that fail to replicate the complex structure of real beef steaks,” the team said.

The Japanese team created a new method of 3D printing that was produced in a similar way to that used to make Kintaro candies – a very old traditional candy formed into a long pipe and cut into slices, each slice showing the face of Kintaro (Golden Boy), a Japanese folk hero.

Their method creates different fibrous tissues such as muscle, fat and blood vessels by 3D printing and integrating them.

This produced “synthetic meat that looks more like the real thing,” according to the study’s authors, who say it could be used to produce other complex structures.

The team started with two types of stem cells, called bovine satellite cells and stem cells derived from adipose tissue (body fat cells).

Under the right laboratory conditions, these “multipotent” cells can be made to transform into every type of cell needed to produce cultured meat.

Individual fibers including muscle, fat or blood vessels have been made from these cells using bioprinting.

The fibers were then arranged in three dimensions, following the histological structure, to mimic the structure of real Wagyu meat, which was eventually sliced ​​perpendicularly, much like traditional Japanese candy.

This process made it possible to reconstruct the complex structure of meat tissue in a customizable way.

“By improving this technology, it will not only be possible to reproduce complex meat structures, but also to make subtle adjustments to fat and muscle components,” said lead author Michiya Matsusaki.

That is, customers could order cultured meat with the desired amount of fat, based on taste and health considerations.

The results were published in the journal Nature Communications.