Umami Meats and TripleBar Collaborate to Create Cell Line for Cultivated Seafood

Umami Meats, a cultivated seafood company, and TripleBar, a biotechnology company, are partnering to create a cell line for lab-grown seafood. The first product in their sights - Japanese eel.

Cultivated seafood is an emerging industry that aims to meet the growing demand for seafood while reducing the environmental impact of fishing and aquaculture. By growing seafood in a lab, companies can reduce the pressure on wild fish populations, minimize the use of antibiotics and other chemicals, and produce seafood with a lower carbon footprint.

Triplebar utilizes a microfluidics platform that can process thousands of complex assays per second with the noise characteristics of a liquid-handling robot, this process is performed in a microreactor. Umami is hoping the result of this microreactor process will be a positive cell line with the properties that it needs to grow in a bioreactor versus in an animal. In this instance, an eel.

According to Triplebar CEO Maria Cho, in their partnership with Umami, she says they’ll look at how small changes to the genome produce the desired result in the cell line.

“We’re taking each of the individual base pairs in the genome and making a change in individual genomes,” said Cho. “And then, we’re oversampling that population to see what combination of changes give that final trait that we’re looking for which, in this case, are cells that grow in tanks versus animals.”

The partnership between Umami Meat and TripleBar Biotechnologies is a significant milestone in the cultivated seafood industry. By developing a cell line for eel, they are paving the way for other companies to create sustainable alternatives to wild-caught seafood. They are also demonstrating the potential of biotechnology to address some of the biggest challenges facing our planet, including food security, climate change, and environmental degradation.

While its partnership with Triplebar will focus on eel, Umami says it has plans to expand the collaboration to other types of fish and that its platform will enable the manufacture of cultivated fish at different production sites tailored to local tastes.

About Umami Meats

Umami is pioneering “not caught” seafood. Umami is weaving together the deep wisdom of our oceans with modern innovation to develop delicious, affordable, and healthy cultivated seafood that provides a sustainable alternative to the harmful impact of traditional fishing practices. Umami knows that nature is our biggest teacher and is dedicated to preserve its delicate balance by thinking differently, honoring tradition, and protecting the taste of the sea.

Umami Meats is cultivating a sustainable seafood future. Umami's cultured fish is nutritionally equivalent to traditional seafood, and provides a delicious culinary experience while protecting our oceans.

About TripleBar

The Triplebar™ Platform maximizes the intersection of molecular biology, biochemistry, microfluidics, and advanced software. Triplebar’s unique platform exists at the intersection of hosts, assays, hardware, and software. By identifying the need, designing data libraries, screening all permutations, then translating successful solution populations to large datasets for use in AI and ML, Triplebar creates a product design engine to find product solutions to humanity’s existential crises. It’s evolution at hyperspeed.