Tuning the efficacy of decellularized apple by coating with alginate/gelatin to behave as a bioscaffold for cultured meat production

Substantial efforts are underway to tackle the current challenges of sustainability and environmental impacts linked to orthodox animal agriculture. This had led to advancement in food innovation guiding the fabrication of edible scaffolds based cultured meat. This current research work aims to develop and validate a new approach in fabricating a 3D porous scaffold of decellularized apple coated with a polymer mixture of gelatin/alginate for cultivated meat production. The fabricated noncoated (A) and coated (CA) 3D scaffolds presented different ratios of pore sizes with the medium-sized pores (100-250µm) being higher in the case of CA. The water absorption capacity of CA (∼64%) was almost two folds compared to A (∼31%) with delayed digestion in the presence of gastric simulated juice with or without pepsin. Both the scaffolds showed the capability to adhere and proliferate muscle satellite cells as single cell culture and muscle satellite along with NIH/3T3 fibroblast cells as co-culture. However, the CA scaffolds showed enhanced capability to adhere and proliferate the two cell lines on its surface compared to A. This work demonstrates an efficient way to fabricate decellularized plant scaffolds with high potential to be used in the production of cultured meat for the food industry.