Triplebar, a biotechnology company, and Umami Meats, a cultivated seafood company, have signed a letter of intent to collaborate on developing cell lines for sustainable cultivated seafood, starting with the Japanese eel according to a release sent to The Spoon.
Triplebar utilizes a microfluidics platform that it says can process thousands of complex assays per second with the noise characteristics of a liquid-handling robot. According to Triplebar CEO Maria Cho, these assays are processed using what she calls microreactors.
“The way to think about this is we take the test tube, and we miniaturize it to this very tiny microreactor that’s smaller than a human hair,” Cho told The Spoon. “And we’re able to put the thing that we want to test into this microreactor, and then the assay reagent that tests the thing that we’re looking for.”
With Umami, that “thing” they’ll be looking for is whether the cell line has the properties that it needs to grow in a bioreactor versus in an animal. That animal, in this case, is the eel, or unagi, a fish hugely popular in Japanese cuisine worldwide. Unfortunately, because of its popularity, unagi has become endangered due to overfishing. While much of the unagi sourced for human consumption is now produced via aquaculture, eel fish farms are incredibly inefficient due to the highly carnivorous nature of eels (researchers say it takes 2.5 tons of wild fish to make 1 ton of eel).
In describing how the Triplebar platform performs compared to traditional assay testing, Cho uses the analogy of the evolution of microprocessors. She says the company fits her microreactors on a chip that fits in the palm of your hand. That chip can process thousands of tests per second, millions per day, which she says is orders of magnitude more than tests run by humans or even liquid-handling robots. This increase is analogous to how a core-dense microprocessor performs compared to early computing technology.
In their partnership with Umami, Cho says they’ll look at how small changes to the genome produce the desired result in the cell line.
“We’re taking each of the individual base pairs in the genome and making a change in individual genomes,” said Cho. “And then, we’re oversampling that population to see what combination of changes give that final trait that we’re looking for which, in this case, are cells that grow in tanks versus animals.”
As for Umami, while its partnership with Triplebar will focus on eel, the company has plans to expand the collaboration to other types of fish. Umami says its “modular” production process works with various fish types, and the company says its platform will enable the manufacture of cultivated fish at different production sites tailored to local tastes. The company, which debuted its fish ball laksa last year in Singapore, says its product roadmap prioritizes endangered species that are IUCN Red Listed, particularly those that are unsuitable for large-scale aquaculture and face growing demand.
