Applications of metabolomics in meat research

Providing consumers with desired meat quality traits is important for acceptance, eating satisfaction, and minimizing meat waste. The application of high-throughput technologies has helped probe molecular changes and understand dynamic meat quality attributes. The metabolomics approach quantifies and identifies the changes in small molecules such as amino acids, peptides, as well as tricarboxylic and glycolytic metabolites in a biological system. Metabolites play an important role in color, tenderness, water holding capacity, and flavor characteristics of meat. The traditional wet-laboratory approach quantifies a few metabolites at a time; however, the metabolomics approach provides a snapshot of global changes in metabolites. Although metabolomics is relatively new in meat science, the number of publications has increased in the last five years. Omics technology, in general, generates a large data set. The use of bioinformatics tools such as pathway analysis has helped identify key regulatory pathways driving differences in meat quality. Validating non-targeted metabolomics results with wet-laboratory techniques will help confirm the role of specific metabolites in biological function. The overall goal of this chapter is to discuss the application of metabolomics in meat science research. More specifically, metabolomics in meat color and flavor development is discussed.