Helen Blau and Sarah Heilshorn awarded a 2023-24 Shriram Synthetic Biology Seed Grant
Livestock requires significant land, water and feed resources, and is responsible for 14.5% of global greenhouse gas emissions. Lab-cultured meat, also known as cellular agriculture, is an approach to conventional methods. Their project, entitled Minimizing the impact of eating meat by replacing livestock with cellular agriculture, proposed a synthetic biology approach to (1) pattern scaffolds that maintain and rejuvenate bovine muscle cell characteristics to enable their long-term culture and (2) synthesize recombinant scaffolds from renewable bacterial fermentation. Seed grants are supported by the School of Medicine, the School of Engineering, and the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability.