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All that pandemic baking has produced more than just delicious bread. It also inspired a team of tissue engineers to try using bread as a scaffold for growing cells 鈥� and after some experimentation, they succeeded with Irish soda bread. One potential use for the bread scaffold could be for growing meat in factories for food.

鈥淚t seemed like a fitting project for these times,鈥� says Andrew Pelling at the University of Ottawa in Canada.

Many groups around the world are working on ways of growing living tissues and organs outside the body for treating all kinds of disorders. For instance, in China, five children born with an underdeveloped ear have been given a replacement grown from their own cells.

A common method聽for this is to 鈥渟eed鈥� a scaffold with cells. Such scaffolds are typically made from the protein collagen, which is a supportive material found in our bodies. But collagen scaffolds are expensive, as well as problematic because they usually come from animals or cadavers.

Pelling and his team have been experimenting with several plant-based alternatives. In 2016, they grew human ears using apples as a scaffold. These were carved into the shape of ears and all the living cells were removed, leaving a cellulose scaffold that was seeded with human cells.

Now, Pelling and his colleagues have used bread as a scaffold. They baked it, removed small portions, sterilised them by soaking in alcohol and then seeded them with various cells.

The first attempts resulted in a soggy mess, as did all the efforts with gluten-free recipes. Irish soda bread turned out to work the best, though the team did have to reinforce its structure by treating it chemically to create more cross-links between the bread鈥檚 fibres.

The researchers found that several cell types, including skin, muscle and bone cells, are able to infiltrate the soda bread scaffolds and proliferate. 鈥淲e now have another very accessible type of biomaterial,鈥� says Pelling. 鈥淚t鈥檚 remarkable to me how human and animal cells have this capacity to grow in really odd, artificial environments.鈥�

He is now planning further studies to see whether these tissues can be safely implanted in animals and could therefore have medical uses.

鈥淚t is very interesting and innovative work,鈥� says Glenn Gaudette at Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Massachusetts. 鈥淲hile there are still many studies needed to determine if bread is a viable scaffold, this innovative thinking by Pelling can help push the field in new directions.鈥�

In addition to medical applications, the use of bread as a scaffold could have implications for cultured or lab-grown meat, says Gaudette. For industrial purposes, keeping costs down will be crucial, so a cheap, edible scaffold would help.

While bread-based tissue engineering might sound rather implausible, an even more unlikely sounding project based on one of Pelling鈥檚 plant materials is looking very promising:聽.

Pelling鈥檚 team has shown that rats whose spinal cords have been completely severed can recover some movement after implanting capillaries extracted from asparagus. The microchannels guide the growth of axons from nerve cells, allowing some connections to be remade.

Pelling stresses that it聽isn鈥檛 a miracle cure and other teams have achieved similar results in rats. Yet the big advantage is that it doesn鈥檛 require using living cells, making it much cheaper and simpler than many other approaches. In October, the US Food and Drug Administration which speeds up the process of beginning human trials.

Reference: bioRxiv,