Tissue-like cultured meats of some livestock have successfully been established by different approaches. However, the production of a structure similar to fish fillets is still challenging. Here, we develop tissue-like cultured fish fillets by assembly of large yellow croaker muscle fibers and adipocytes with 3D-printed gel. Inhibition of Tgf-β and Notch signals significantly promoted myogenic differentiation of piscine satellite cells (PSCs). The mixture of fish gelatin and sodium alginate combined with a p53 inhibitor and a Yap activator supported PSC viability and proliferation. Based on the texture of fish muscle tissue, a 3D scaffold was constructed by gelatin-based gel mixed with PSCs. After proliferation and differentiation, the muscle scaffold was filled with cultured piscine adipocytes. Finally, tissue-like fish fillets with 20 × 12 × 4 mm were formed, consisting of 5.67 × 10⁷ muscles and 4.02 × 10⁷ adipocytes. The biomanufacture of tissue-like cultured fish fillet here could be a promising technology to customize meat production with high fidelity.

Among the families of transcription factors expressed at the neural plate border, Sox proteins have been shown to regulate multiple aspects of neural crest development. Sox8, Sox9 and Sox10, exhibit overlapping expression domains in neural crest progenitors, and studies in mouse suggest that Sox8 functions redundantly with Sox9 and Sox10 during neural crest development. Here, we show that in Xenopus, Sox8 accumulates at the lateral edges of the neural plate at the mid-gastrula stage; in contrast to its mouse and chick orthologs, Sox8 expression precedes that of Sox9 and Sox10 in neural crest progenitors. Later in development, Sox8 expression persists in migrating cranial crest cells as they populate the pharyngeal arches and in trunk neural crest cells, in a pattern that recapitulates both Sox9 and Sox10 expression domains. Although morpholino-mediated knockdown of Sox8 protein did not prevent the formation of neural crest progenitors, the timing of their induction was severely affected. This delay in neural crest specification had dramatic consequences on the development of multiple lineages of the neural crest. We demonstrate that these defects are due to the inability of neural crest cells to migrate into the periphery, rather than to a deficiency in neural crest progenitors specification and survival. These results indicate that the control of Sox8 expression at the neural plate border is a key process in initiating neural crest formation in Xenopus, and highlight species-specific differences in the relative importance of SoxE proteins during neural crest development.

Morphologically distinct males and females are observed throughout the animal kingdom. Why and how sex evolved and is maintained in most living organ