The climate impact and land use of cultivated meat: Evaluating agricultural feedstock production

For energy and oil plants, it is presumed that starch is present as amylopectin (approxi- mately 70–80%) and amylose (20–30%), both of which are polymers of the monosaccharide D-Glucose (primarily α-1,4-glycosidic bonds). It is approximated that starch or disaccharides can be broken down completely and utilized as glucose. This assumption is justified by the compensatory effect between any decomposition losses and the mass increase of the glucose fraction caused by the addition of H2O (H+ and OH- adaption) during hydrolysis [37]. With grain legumes, the case arises where some non-starch polysaccharides or oligosaccha- rides are analytically captured in the starch fraction, which, besides glucose, have up to 50% other monosaccharides (Mannose, galactose, and fructose) as basic building blocks. There are also considerable varietal differences [91, 92]. Therefore, it’s roughly assumed that for these plants, 50% of the analytical sugar and starch fraction can be present as, or can be converted to glucose. Humbird (2021) [37] presumes a protein solubility of 88% and a hydrolysis conver- sion of 80% for hydrolysate from soybean meal, which corresponds to an overall amino acid yield of 70.4%. As stated before, an amino acid yield of 70% is assumed for all considered agri- cultural crops in this study. The data on each crop’s relative nutrient supply, as detailed in Table 4, serves as a founda- tional parameter for our calculations and is thus essential for determining the nutrient yield per crop. Our analysis distinctly categorized crops into energy and protein plants, which is a

differentiation that proved to be critical in the outcomes of our study. As stated before, the yield by crop together (as shown in Table 5) with the nutrient supply (as shown in Table 4) led to the nutrient supply by crop in kilogram per hectare (as shown in Table 6). Table 3. Relative nutrient requirements for cell mass production. g/g CM FM stoichiometric demanda Glucose 0.362 Arginine 0.016 Cysteine 0.005 Glutamine 0.044 Histidine 0.006 Isoleucine 0.012 Lysine 0.020 Mehionin 0.004 Phenylalanin 0.011 Threonine 0.014 Tryptophan 0.004 Tyrosine 0.012 Valine 0.016 Alanine 0.016 Asparagine 0.011 Aspartic acid 0.014 Glycine 0.011 Leucine 0.019 Proline 0.010 Serine 0.015 Glutamic acid + Glutamine 0.044 Asparagine + Aspartic acid 0.025 aHumbird, (2021) [37]. Note: g/g CM = gram per gram cultivated meat; FM = fresh mass. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0316480.t003 PLOS ONE Evaluating agricultural feedstock for cultivated meat PLOS ONE | https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0316480 January 22, 2025 11 / 27