The field of cellular agriculture aims to develop sustainable alternatives to conventional livestock farming by producing structured cultivated meat products with reduced environmental impact. In particular, the fabrication of whole-cut products such as bovine steak requires the recreation of the hierarchical architecture of native muscle tissue, including aligned muscle fibers and intramuscular fat. This project focuses on enabling the large-scale production of such muscle–fat constructs using a novel high-throughput 3D bio-screen-printing technology.

Within the DFG-funded MeatPrint project at the Institute of Printing Science and Technology (IDD), Technical University of Darmstadt, a screen-printing-based bioprinting platform is being developed to overcome current scalability limitations of extrusion-based systems. Building on promising results demonstrating high cell viability and printing resolution, this thesis aims to advance multilayer 3D bio-screen-printing of sustainable, hydrogel-based bioinks for the co-culture and differentiation of primary bovine myocytes and adipocytes.

The project includes the establishment of primary bovine (co-)culture systems, development and characterization of animal-free bioinks and media, and optimization of multimaterial 3D printing parameters. A central objective is to investigate muscle–fat cell interactions in 3D and to identify suitable materials and printing strategies for aligned, fiber-like constructs. Initial structured tissue prototypes will be fabricated and analyzed.