PhD Conferral Mr. Shiji Ding

Keywords: cultured meat, satellite cells, stemness, long-term culture, aging

“Maintaining the stemness of satellite cells during long-term culture”

Traditional animal agriculture is not sustainable. Cultured meat can potentially solve major upcoming problems caused by traditional livestock. The lack of high purity livestock satellite cells from farm animals limits the research on cultured meat. This dissertation mainly focuses on characterization and isolation of highly purified porcine and bovine satellite cells as cell sources for cultured meat. Long-term in vitro cultivation induces defects in proliferation and differentiation of these cells. Inhibition of p38 MAPK signaling partially rescues the defects but not JAK2-STAT3 signal. Long-term culture of myoblast cells resembles the effect of aging. Inhibiting or rescuing aging signals may help to bring large-scale bovine muscle cell culture for cultured beef applications closer to reality.