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Beyond Cell Expansion: Microcarriers as Functional and Edible Platforms for Cultivated Meat Production
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DOI：10.1007/s11947-026-04494-9.png)
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Abstract
En 中文
Cultivated meat has emerged as a promising strategy to mitigate the environmental impacts of conventional livestock production; however, its industrial scalability remains limited by the need to scale up anchorage-dependent cell cultures efficiently. Microcarriers have become a key enabling technology, providing high surface-area-to-volume ratios that support cell proliferation in bioreactor systems. This review critically evaluates current microcarrier fabrication strategies, with emphasis on decellularization, electrospray, and emulsion-based approaches, and discusses their implications for scalability, food safety, and final product functionality. Decellularized plant and fungal matrices offer structurally complex, low-cost, and potentially edible alternatives that mimic the architecture of the extracellular matrix. In contrast, electrospray and emulsion techniques enable precise control over particle size, morphology, and mechanical properties using food-grade biopolymers such as gelatin, chitosan, and plant proteins. Despite these advances, significant challenges remain, particularly in balancing mechanical stability and cytocompatibility during crosslinking, ensuring regulatory compliance of food-grade materials, and maintaining cell viability under hydrodynamic stress in large-scale bioreactors. Notably, the choice of microcarrier directly influences not only cell expansion efficiency but also the nutritional, structural, and sensory attributes of the final product. Therefore, future research should prioritize integrating fabrication technologies with bioprocess engineering and food design principles to enable the development of cost-effective, consumer-acceptable cultivated meat products.
Keywords:
Cellular agriculture
Cell culture strategies
Plant-based biomaterials
Biomass expansion
Bioprocessing
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