Cultured meat produced using satellite cells has emerged to address issues such as overpopulation, the ethical conundrums associated with the breeding environment, and the methane gas emissions associated with factory farming. To date, however, the challenges of maintaining satellite cells in vitro and reducing the costs of the culture media are still substantial. Gelatin, collagen, and fibronectin are commonly used extracellular matrices (ECMs) that facilitate signal integration with the cells and promote cell adhesion. In this study, we compared the proliferation, cell cycle, immunocytochemistry, and expression levels of Pax7, Pax3, Myf5, MyoD1, and MyoG genes in bovine satellite cells (BSCs) cultured on gelatin-, collagen- and fibronectin-coated dishes as part of short- and long-term cultures. We observed that BSCs cultured on gelatin-coated dishes showed higher levels of Pax7 expression than BSCs cultured on collagen- and fibronectin-coated dishes in both short- and long-term cultures, indicating that BSCs cultured on gelatin effectively maintained the satellite cell population in both the short- and long-term cultures. Our study highlights that gelatin is an effective ECM for the maintenance of BSCs and the production of cultured meat.

Researching the technology for in vitro differentiation of embryonic stem cells (ESCs) into neural lineages is very important in developmental biology, regenerative medicine, and cell therapy. Thus, studies on in vitro differentiation of ESCs into neural lineages by co-culture are expected to improve our understanding of this process. A co-culture system has long been used to study interactions between cell populations, improve culture efficiency, and establish synthetic interactions between populations. In this study, we investigated the effect of a co-culture of ESCs with neural stem cells (NSCs) in two-dimensional (2D) or three-dimensional (3D) culture conditions. Furthermore, we examined the effect of an NSC-derived conditioned medium (CM) on ESC differentiation. OG2-ESCs lost the specific morphology of colonies and Oct4-GFP when co-cultured with NSC. Additionally, real-time PCR analysis showed that ESCs co-cultured with NSCs expressed higher levels of ectoderm markers Pax6 and Sox1 under both co-culture conditions. However, the differentiation efficiency of CM was lower than that of the non-conditioned medium. Collectively, our results show that co-culture with NSCs promotes the differentiation of ESCs into the ectoderm.