Applications of proteomics in meat research

The postgenomic era witnessed an exponential increase in the application of omics tools, especially proteomics in agricultural and food sciences. The emergence of mass spectrometry as a robust technique to ionize macromolecules, advances in gel electrophoresis and more specifically mono-dimensional and bi-dimensional electrophoresis, and ever expanding protein identification and quantification, warehouse databases and bioinformatics tools profusely contributed to this growth and ability to analyze thousands of proteins. In meat research, the high-throughput proteomic techniques including current developments in label-free methods rendered themselves as powerful tools to identify and qualify post-mortem muscle/meat protein changes and consequently to examine in an in-depth manner the underlying molecular mechanisms behind the conversion of muscle to meat. These powerful techniques were further used to investigate the biochemical pathways underlying meat quality determination, especially tenderness, color, pH decline, dry-curing and the study of meat quality defects. Furthermore, proteomics has been extensively used for the discovery of biomarkers of meat quality traits and for meat authenticity. Characterizing the proteome basis of meat quality enables the industry to engineer novel processing strategies, to develop predictive tools, and to produce high quality meat to the growing population of consumers.