When he found out his colleagues were working on lingonberry, strawberry and cloudberry cell cultures, he asked what they tasted like. In this application, cell culture helps produce enough of the berry and leaf cells to supply the market. The berry cells contain chemical compounds that lotion-makers and health professionals rely on: Finnish company Lumene relies on the beneficial properties of cultivated cloudberry cells for some of its skin products, and a common cancer drug, paclitaxel, is derived from the cells of the Pacific Yew. The idea got started when Reuter started working in a VTT lab that cultivates plant cell lines for industrial use in things like cosmetics and medicine. His team is working on what they’re calling a “home bioreactor”-a countertop appliance that can, in theory, fill the same space in your life as a Nespresso machine does for coffee, but with fresh berry cells, including some from plants that would be impossible to cultivate using traditional means because of their adaptations to life in hostile places like the Arctic. That’s the question that drove Lauri Reuter and his colleagues at the state-run tech company VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland to start working on a project that totally reimagines how we think of growing food. But what if you could grow your own fruit right at home, getting the health benefits of impossible-to-cultivate berries or out-of-season favorites without having to eat pricy imported produce or take supplements? In the dead of winter, fresh fruit can be expensive, with soft fruits like berries coming to the United States from Central and South America-sometimes even being flown in.
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