Click here to download all files (slides and protocols): HERE
Week 1: Ice Breakers
During week one, our goal is to acclimatize students to the class and contextualize the learning material that is to come in the following weeks.
Week 2: Cellular Agriculture 101
This week we begin to delve deeper into the background and significance of cultured meat.
Week 3: Primary Bovine Cell Isolations
This week, practical laboratory learning commences with the very first step in the process of generating cultured meat – the initial isolation of stem cells from livestock.
Week 4: Cell Propagation and Cell Banking
This week students will learn to propagate (passage/subculture) the isolated cells, as well as generate frozen stocks of the cells for storage in liquid nitrogen.
Week 5: Tissue Engineering – Scaffold Fabrication
Here we prepare scaffolds for 3D cell culture! The goal is to provide cells with an environment that promotes their growth and differentiation into larger multinucleated muscle fibers i.e meat or meat-like tissue.
Week 6: Scaffold Seeding
Students will now seed the cell culture scaffolds they fabricated last week and also try being a sensory evaluation panelist by blind taste testing a series of different milk and plant milks!
Week 7: Journal Club
Students present their critical analyses of papers relevant to cellular agriculture and discuss their topics with the class.
Week 8: Biotech/Cell-Ag Company Visit
This week students will visit Gingko Bioworks – a local biotechnology company, as well as give updates progress updates on their Final Project.
Week 9: Cell Imaging – Immunofluorescence
We will finally get to visualize the meat that we’ve been growing in our scaffolds!
Week 10: Food Science – Water Holding Capacity and Sensory Evaluation
Today we take a look at food science and learn about analytical techniques to evaluate meat once it’s been actually been produced!
Week 11: Shark Tank (Final Project) Part 1
The audience (students not presenting this week) will be given a fictional amount of money to allocate to each group’s cell-ag start up/research concept, and the winner will receive a prize!
Week 12: Shark Tank (Final Project) Part 2
The audience (students not presenting this week) will be given a fictional amount of money to allocate to each group’s cell-ag start up/research concept, and the winner will receive a prize!
Week 13: Cooking Competition
To wrap up the course, students will bring in a dish related to cellular agriculture, alternative proteins for a pot luck. Enterprising students can also participate in a competition to see who can make the greatest, most creative food!