The cultured meat industry has officially gone prehistoric, with companies even making new products featuring the DNA of the woolly mammoth, an animal that went extinct around 10,000 years ago.
The Belgian startup Paleo says it added woolly mammoth protein to a plant-based burger — and that the result was more intense than with cow. The company uses precision fermentation technology to develop different animal heme proteins, including that which are found in beef, chicken, pork, lamb, tuna, and even mammoth.
The proteins, or myoglobin's, can then be added to any meat substitute, including cultured meat, to provide a meaty taste. In live animals, myoglobin stores oxygen in the muscles. It's the protein that gives meat a red color. Though it may look like blood, the juices of a medium-rare steak are red because of myoglobin.
But Paleo used precise fermentation, along with yeast, to produce myoglobin without using any animal cells. They made the mammoth myoglobin using short DNA sequences taken from a 1.2 million-year-old fossil at the Center for Palaeogenetics in Stockholm, Sweden.
This seems like a lot of trouble to make "plant-based food" animalistic: the best way to get the {real deal} is to just eat the freaking meat!
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