this post was submitted on 30 Nov 2023
248 points (84.3% liked)
Technology
60062 readers
3572 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Yup, Tasmanian Devil facial tumor disease is indeed pretty graphic.
It should be noted however that the transmission is limited to within a single species, which recently went through a population bottleneck that resulted in their immune systems having difficulty telling each other's cells apart. Something like a bovine-to-human transmissible cancer would be orders of magnitude more unlikely.
Wouldn't the end goal be to create immortal cell lines for the various cuts of meat? Otherwise, we need to keep (albeit much smaller) populations of livestock around to continually harvest new cells from.
I am not so into synthetic meat ;-) So this is all speculation from my side. You can grow these cells for many cell divisions just not forever. So you keep a master stock of an early generation in the deep freezer (maybe 1000 vials). Then thaw one vial and expand the cells. Maybe you create a secondary derived stock. If they are old, thaw a fresh vial etc. If the/master stock is used up. Then you need to generate a new one.
P.s. regarding the transmissible cancer cells. I don't think it would happen likely. I think the cells need to loose the MHC gene/protein for this. Just wanted to tell that it exists.
P.p.s I would be much more worried by viruses/ mycoplasma unknowingly infecting the cell culture. On the other hand farm animals are sick all the time too.