I'm so frustrated bc I can't find any answer to my question or any information or even scenario
I just want to know if it's possible to grow the skin of a potato in a lab from the cells. no potato, just the skin
little bit of research point to yes, possibly it would need to be layered for multiple reasons
but idk! I'm not a potato scientist!
reasons why I want to know is 1. I just really love potato skins. that's the kind of jokey reason
but 2. I think that it can be used as an alternative to animal stomachs as casings (for sausages and hotdogs for example)
not russet, golden probably.
I was eating a mini Golden potato and bit into it, and the skin when cooked is taut but thin, and when bitten with medium force gives that "pop" that hotdogs especially need. idc what anyone says, a hotdog gotta have that pop and no vegan ones have it
how does anyone make their own food line or get their ideas into reality.
"I'm just a normal person who can't do anything so I came up with this revolutionary idea to fix that and now I'm an entrepreneur and I have a factory and I'm making a billion sales a day!" HOW
How do ppl go from normal person with idea to having a factory making stuff. networking?? ew.
anyway
I know it can be done I just have no resources and also education to do it so I guess I'll just go to sleep
@nerdfishgirl ? I thought you might have some insights here.
Tbh, when we’re getting to the point of growing the potato skins in a petri dish for the purpose of hot dog casings, one might as well (from scientific, not ethical standpoint) just grow animal stomach cells (it can be done in similar way and there are several companies trying to do similar thing with animal muscle cells for purposes of producing meat).
Whether this is considered decent alternative depends on the reason someone is choosing a vegan lifestyle I would guess? It would not be killing any animals (assuming the original cells were collected without killing the animal involved), and would be roughly the same environmental cost as producing potato cells in a lab. But it would be an animal product so ??? I feel like some people would be cool with that and others wouldn’t?
But to get back to the original question, yes, it would be theoretically possible to grow just the potato skin in culture, however, bc there’s been so much less research done on plants than on animals at this point it would probably be harder to grow just the potato skin than to grow just animal stomach cells in vitro (i.e. in a petri dish/lab). This is because when you take animal cells from an animal stomach and put them on a petri dish, they are gonna stay animal stomach cells and produce animal stomach assuming you give them the right conditions to keep them alive and growing.
With plants? A potato skin cell that you put on a petri dish is probably going to revert to being totipotent - meaning it can become any type of plant cell. This is actually how we clone plants and how genetic modification in plants is so much more advanced than in animals - take any cell from a plant and it can become a whole new plant - so you only need to modify that one cell (and it doesn’t have to be a seed/egg/sperm/zygote). The difficulty is that this reversion to totipotency would probably happen to the potato skin cells, and then they are not going to produce potato skins - and because plant developmental biology is not studied in detail and is only really studied in any sort of detail in Arabidopsis (a model plant which does not produce tubers like potatoes do) it would require research to determine the pathway of potato skin development and how to activate it.
Perhaps this research has been done, but I kinda doubt it. (If has been, has probably been done by big ag company to breed potato with a thinner skin for better french fry production). Tbh, if you really wanted this to be a thing, I would contact a big ag company like Syngenta or Bayer bc they would be interested in breeding a potato for thinner skin and possibly be willing to fund the research. And could make a deal maybe with Cargill or create spin-off company to produce lab grown potato skin.
