Scientists Are Growing Meat’s Main Ingredient in Two Plants You’d Never Suspect

Plant-based meat companies have spent years trying to replicate the color, flavor, and nutrition that animal proteins bring to conventional meat. Now a new study has narrowed that challenge to a specific ingredient: myoglobin, the oxygen-binding protein that helps give meat its color and some of its taste, and researchers say they have grown it inside two plants few shoppers would associate with meat production.

Researchers produced a meat protein in two crop plants

Scientists at Imperial College London and collaborators reported in Frontiers in Plant Science on August 6, 2026, that they stably produced porcine myoglobin in the chloroplasts of cultivated tobacco and lettuce plants. According to the peer-reviewed paper, the team generated one transplastomic tobacco line and one transplastomic lettuce line, and both plants maintained normal morphology, produced fertile flowers, and generated viable seeds under selection.

The paper states that myoglobin accumulated at about 2.8% of total soluble protein in tobacco and about 1.5% in lettuce, with a repeat tobacco measurement estimating 2.6%. The researchers also reported that the engineered protein appeared at the expected 17-kDa size and that tobacco-produced myoglobin was purified and analyzed for heme incorporation and absorbance characteristics associated with functional myoglobin.

The specific plants are notable because lettuce is an edible crop while tobacco is not typically linked to food production. The study says tobacco was used as a high-performing model system for chloroplast engineering, while lettuce offers a possible food ingredient platform if regulatory pathways eventually allow commercial use.

What the finding could mean for food production

The research does not describe a consumer product launch, a restaurant rollout, or a commercial manufacturing plant in any U.S. state. What is confirmed is that the work demonstrates stable myoglobin production in two higher plants, and that lettuce, in particular, could serve as a future crop-based platform for ingredients used in plant-based meat. The researchers have not announced a timeline for commercialization, and no public list of U.S. production sites or retail partners has been released.

That matters because most consumers currently encounter “meaty” plant-based ingredients through fermentation-based systems rather than crops grown specifically to express animal proteins. The paper itself notes Impossible Foods uses soy leghemoglobin produced in the yeast Komagataella pastoris, illustrating that the industry’s current model depends heavily on bioreactors and industrial fermentation.

The broader plant molecular farming sector is already testing other crops for similar uses. A June 2025 Good Food Institute fact sheet says IngredientWerks uses corn to express myoglobin, while Moolec Science has USDA approval to grow peas that can produce iron-rich bovine myoglobin. That places the lettuce-and-tobacco study within an expanding effort to shift some specialty food ingredient production into field or greenhouse crops.

Why scientists are trying plants instead of tanks

The main driver is cost and scale. According to the study, heterotrophic systems such as bacteria and yeast can produce myoglobin, but they remain constrained by expensive feedstocks, energy use, and reliance on bioreactors. Chloroplast transformation, the authors wrote, offers high transgene expression, many genome copies per cell, and limited gene dispersion compared with some other genetic engineering approaches.

The paper also ties the effort directly to sensory and nutritional gaps in meat alternatives. Myoglobin contains heme, which the researchers say contributes to meat’s red color, metallic and umami flavor notes, and a more bioavailable form of iron than the non-heme iron that dominates in plants. In practical terms, that means companies are not only chasing protein quantity but also the specific molecules that make beef and pork taste and look the way consumers expect.

For shoppers, the immediate takeaway is that this remains an early-stage ingredient story rather than a supermarket change. No national food safety regulator has yet approved a protein ingredient made through plant molecular farming for commercial sale, according to the Good Food Institute’s 2025 industry overview. The next steps, based on the study and industry briefings, are likely to focus on improving yields, confirming regulatory status, and determining whether edible crops like lettuce can move from lab proof-of-concept to food manufacturing.