Roslin researchers identify CD13 marker to boost cultivated meat fat production

A surface protein called CD13 could help unlock one of cultivated meat’s hardest problems: making fat efficiently enough to matter on a commercial line. Researchers at the Roslin Institute in Edinburgh found that bovine cells carrying CD13 produced 10.3 times more fat than CD13-negative cells, a result that could change both the economics and the realism of cultivated beef blends, structured cuts and hybrid products.

The study, published in npj Science of Food on January 13, 2026, focused on adipose-derived bovine mesenchymal stem and stromal cells from five animals. Seungmee Lee, Tom Thrower, Susanna E. Riley, Cristina L. Esteves and F. Xavier Donadeu clonally expanded the cells, RNA-sequenced 10 adipogenic and 10 non-adipogenic clones, and found 35 CD genes among the differentially expressed transcripts. Only CD13 showed meaningful surface expression in follow-up flow-cytometry testing.

That made CD13 more than a biological curiosity. The team used flow-activated cell sorting to separate CD13-positive and CD13-negative fractions, then compared how each behaved. The CD13-positive cells were larger, flatter and slower-growing, and they expressed higher levels of the adipogenic regulators PPARG and CEBPA. Just as important, the two populations showed similar ability to differentiate into bone and cartilage, suggesting the marker enriches fat-forming potential without broadly altering other lineage traits.

The bottleneck matters because cultivated fat remains one of the sector’s most difficult ingredients to make affordably. It is also one of the most valuable, since fat drives flavor, juiciness, mouthfeel and consumer acceptance. A selectable marker that consistently identifies the cells most likely to become fat could reduce variability before scale-up and improve the yield on every batch, which is exactly where many cultivated-meat business models still struggle.

That is also the central test for the new result. A 10-fold improvement in a lab setting is meaningful; a reproducible, scalable manufacturing advantage is what would move the sector closer to routine production. The key question is how reliably CD13 can be used across larger runs, different cell populations and, eventually, other species without losing the yield gain that made the finding notable in the first place.

The work was backed by an Innovate UK SMART award, an Impact Acceleration Account award and an Institute Strategic Programme Grant to the Roslin Institute. It builds on Roslin’s earlier cultivated-fat work, including the May 2025 announcement of FaTTy, a pig-derived fat cell line described as self-renewing indefinitely while keeping its ability to differentiate into fat cells. Roslin Technologies, which says its cultivated-meat portfolio covers beef, pork and lamb, with seafood in development, has already oriented its business around scale-up-ready cells, media and regulatory support. CD13 now looks like another step toward solving the industry’s most stubborn bottleneck: not just growing cells, but growing the right cells in enough quantity to make cultivated fat commercially real.