The Science of Alt Protein: Innovations in cultivated meat and LLMs from rising researchers

Join us for our next Science of Alt Protein seminar, where we’ll hear from two PhD students working on innovative projects to advance alternative protein science. ** Engineering cultivated chicken: exploring mechanobiology to reduce costs with Jorge Guadalupe Jorge will share a study that investigates the remarkable potential of random cellulose acetate nanofibers to create scaffolds that allow for the cultivation of myoblasts and adipocytes. Jorge and his colleagues unveiled the unparalleled capabilities of the scaffold in facilitating muscle differentiation, independent of differentiation media, by exploiting the YAP/TAZ-related mechanotransduction pathway. In addition, they have successfully developed a novel process for stacking cell-loaded CAN sheets, enabling the production of a three-dimensional chicken meat product that contains both muscle cells and adipocytes. ** LLMs for alternative protein development: initial findings with Anna Thomas Anna and her colleagues investigate what Large Language Models (LLMs) can contribute to alternative protein development. In collaboration with food scientists, they evaluated LLMs on experimental design and sensory prediction tasks using a recent dataset of plant-based meats. For experimental design, food science experts estimated that collaboration with an LLM can reduce time spent by 45% on average, compared to 22% for collaboration with another expert human food scientist. Their work, recently accepted at the International Conference on Machine Learning 2025, represents an initial exploration of what LLMs can contribute to the alternative protein domain and highlights both promising capabilities and limitations.