Company Brings Back Wooly Mammoths as Giant Meatballs

An Australian company specializing in cultivated meat recently unveiled a giant meatball allegedly made from lab-grown meat using wooly mammoth DNA.

While most cultured meat companies are focused on producing alternatives to conventional meats like chicken, beef and pork, Australian start-up Vow is taking a different approach. It is focusing on mixing and matching cells from different unconventional animal species, even ones that have been extinct for thousands of years. To prove that it can be done, Vow took the DNA sequence for mammoth myoglobin, a key muscle protein in giving meat its flavor, and filled the few gaps in the strand with elephant DNA. They then put this sequence in myoblast stem cells from a sheep and grew the tens of billions of cells necessary to create the lab-grown meat.

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