The proteinmaxxing trend, wherein seemingly every product on grocery shelves is jam-packed with protein to constipate a horse, seems to be hitting its zenith.
How else do you explain a team of researchers, who published their findings in Frontiers in Plant Science, announcing that they’ve created protein-packed lettuce that produces pig protein, and did it by adding an animal gene to plant cells?
The team, led by Alexia Groff of Imperial College London, genetically engineered lettuce and tobacco plants to produce myoglobin, an animal protein responsible for making meat meaty. Seemingly pulling inspiration from Silver Age comic books, the researchers employed something they called a “gene gun,” which fires microscopic metal particles coated with DNA into plant cells.
They targeted chloroplasts, the structures responsible for photosynthesis, because chloroplasts can produce large amounts of protein. The wild technique of shooting bullets at plant cells actually worked, and the engineered plants past the pig gene onto their offspring.
The Future of Plant-Based Meat Might Start With Pig-Protein Lettuce
This piggy lettuce produced roughly 810 milligrams of myoglobin per kilogram of dry weight. It’s a lot less than meat, but considering how much land, water, and energy livestock production requires, it could turn vegetarianism into a more worthwhile endeavor for people who are trying to hit daily protein goals.
Appeasing meat eaters, basically pleading with them to eat a vegetable, isn’t the goal here. The researchers think that they could extract the myoglobin and add it to plant-based meat, to potentially give it more of the color, flavor, and nutritional characteristics of actual meat.
We’re still a way off before meaty lettuce hits store shelves. The plants are producing a ton of myoglobin at the moment, and also there’s still the matter of studying whether these things can even be safely grown or even safely eaten.
If it all works out, there could be a viable protein-packed vegetable alternative for non-carnivores. That’s probably the better way to look at it than appeasing gym bros who were afraid of vegetables.
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