Cultured fruit; growing a tomato without a plant

Great progress has been made in developmental biology in recent decades. In animal biology this has led to the advent of ‘lab-grown meat’. (Also known as ‘cultured meat’). We have proposed ‘cultured fruit’ as a sustainable technology for industrial fruit production. In this process, fruits are created from tissue and grown on a liquid medium with nutrients and sugar. We've already shown that we can excise a flower from the plant and grow it into a fruit on a petridish, but the fruits stay very small. Our current hypothesis is that water, assimilate and nutrient uptake is low in the excised fruits because of wound-response and/or the absence of positive hydrostatic pressure. Your task will be to carry out a series of experiments in which you apply treatments and observe the resulting uptake of medium, growth and possibly quality of the fruit.

Used skills

• Fruit growth and development measurements
• Operating pressure-based bioreactor
• Possibly sugar analysis
• Possibly elemental analysis

Interested in doing a BSc or MSc thesis at HPP? Please contact Katharina Hanika or Kim Vanderwolk via the HPP office (office.hpp@wur.nl).