Muscle Meadows

Tissue engineers are scientists who build muscles, connective tissues, or other parts of organs in the hopes of repairing and replacing those damaged by disease or injury. They generally grow their cells on some sort of scaffold to recreate the 3D forms and contours of the organ or tissue they’re trying to mimic. Scaffolds must be compatible with cell adherence, organisation, and growth – in the case of muscle, for example, they must allow cells to grow in long parallel fibres – and it’s a bonus if the material is cheap enough to scale-up tissue production. That’s why the muscle cells in this photo (nuclei stained blue) are growing on grass. Yes, you read that correctly. Decellularised grass, it turns out, has natural microscopic grooves ideal for growing and fusing muscle cells into naturalistic fibres. What’s more, grass is readily available, incredibly inexpensive, and perhaps best of all it’s green.

Written by Ruth Williams

Ruth Williams

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Ruth is a freelance science journalist based in the US. She's a regular correspondent for The Scientist, and her work has appeared in The Lancet, Nature, Scientific American Mind, BBC Focus and elsewhere. Twitter @rooph

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• Image from work by Scott J. Allan, Marianne J. Ellis and Paul A. De Bank
• Department of Pharmacy & Pharmacology and Centre for Therapeutic Innovation, University of Bath, Bath, UK
• Image originally published with a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
• Published in Journal of Biomedical Materials Research Part A, May 2021