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Comment by EngManagerIsMe | Hacker News Reader

Can you explain a bit more? This seems like basic biology -- cells grow whether they are attached to a cow or not, assuming you provide them with the basic ingredients they need and the environment they need to grow.

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Most cells will not grow in an infinite uniform lineage, but rather will try to develop into a cow, or stop reproducing at some point because they think they're in an old cow.

Most mammalian cells, sure. The majority of cells on Earth are not mammalian cells or even animal cells.

Ah that's an interesting point, what cell family is on the table, something like prokaryotic vs eukaryotic.

Just for everyone's information before the chain continues. Cultured meat generally refers to real but modified animal cells. So when you're eating cultured chicken they're effectively similar or even identical to a real animal's cells.

Sure. I'm just saying that there's nothing unearthly or, uh, "satanic" about a self-perpetuating cell line that doesn't turn into a whole multicellular organism. Sometimes it seems like the main thing people took away from the HeLa story was "aaaaah, spooky immortal cells!"

Although it was hardly the only bad thing about the story, that someone's cancer outlived them by a century is is horrifying.

It's happened in the wild a couple times:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canine_transmissible_venereal_...

I've been curious about these so called immortal cell lines. Do they really just mean by immortal something qualitative and at the extremes, like some unreasonably high number of cell division cycles before senescence takes over and the tissue reaches end of line? I've been curious if anyone's ever sequenced the DNA from these lines to see if they're truly the same source organism or have diverged or another organism was slipped in their place unbeknownst to anyone not looking.

Most immortal lines come from samples of tumors. I don't know how GOOD Meat is doing it.

They claim to use the spontaneously immortalized UMNSAH/DF-1 chicken fibroblast cell line, which isn't a tumor cell line. I still wouldn't eat any "cultured meat" regardless of the cell line (if my great-grandparents didn't eat it, I'm not eating it) but there is a difference between immortalized and full-on cancerous cells.

>I've been curious if anyone's ever sequenced the DNA from these lines to see if they're truly the same source organism or have diverged or another organism was slipped in their place unbeknownst to anyone not looking.

Cellline contamination is a real problem where a foreign population out competes the intended cell line. There are estimates that thousands of papers have been published where the intended cellline has been accidentally replaced with HeLa.

> This seems like basic biology -- cells grow whether they are attached to a cow or not

This is not true. Most cow cells will almost immediately die, unless they are attached to a cow. Even if plenty of nutrients are available.

This is a basic anti-cancer mechanism, cells need to receive specific signals from nearby cells to stay alive. The default state for a cell is "dead".

There are ways to work around that, and the most typical is to use "immortalized" cell lines. Basically, cancerous cells that can grow without bound.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stem_cell

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