Home baking frenzy inspires tissue scaffold for growing muscle

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 – 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.

“It seemed like a fitting project for these times,” 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,…