| Abstract [eng] |
The global population will tend to grow to almost 10 billion by the year 2050, the demand for animal protein is likely to more than double during the same time span. Traditional animal farming practices, which account for 14 percent of world‘s greenhouse gas emissions, one-third of the world's freshwater consumption, significant deforestation in the tropics, are not able to satisfy the requirement in a sustainable manner. Of the protein alternatives currently being developed, cultivated meat is the only one that can be used to provide the full sensory and structural experience of a conventional wholecut meat, but it needs a three dimensional structure to enable muscle cells to grow and organise themselves into meat-like tissue. Since this scaffold needs to be eaten as a food product, synthetic polymers, which are employed in the medical tissue engineering industry, are not a possibility, and the only viable option is a plant material. The thesis aims to explore the potential use of electrospinning to create zein fibrous scaffolds, which is a food-grade prolamin protein from maize, for cultivated meat. A series of seven experimental sets was systematically investigated to observe the influence of solvent ratio, rate of flow, voltage, the distance between needle-to-collector, additive composition, and also zein concentration on the fibre morphology, fibre diameter, and pore size. The 70:30 ratio of ethanol:water was determined to be optimal, resulting in stable ribbon fibres without beads and with an open porous structure. Glucose alone resulted in the most compacted fibres and glycerol-glucose combination gave the best fibre diameter and pore size. Chemical integrity of zein protein matrix was confirmed by FTIR in all conditions, while the XRD showed a major amorphous structure which is desirable for an edible scaffold. The optimized conditions elaborated here could serve as a reproducible platform for scaffold fabrication for future cell seeding and tissue formation studies in a food-grade medium. |
