4.2 Metabolic pathway models
An important objective in bioprocess design is achieving highly efficient conversion of inputted nutrients into biomass, a metric known as the yield coefficient [10]. In cultivated meat production this is particularly important as the cost of cell culture media is currently very high and because of the enormous scaling requirements to support conventional meat demand. Computer models of metabolic pathways should prove to be advantageous in this process optimization challenge, facilitated, in part, by the depth of intercellular information that can be obtained with “omics” approaches. Indeed, constraint-based modeling techniques have proved very useful in understanding and optimizing CHO cell growth in a bioreactor environment [11] and metabolic network models have been used with bone marrow-derived stem cells [12].