Proteomic application in predicting food quality relating to animal welfare. A review

Abstract

Background New market trends and new challenges in meat quality lead us to improve animal handling. During the animal rearing, many stressful situations could impact on the biochemical process, affecting the transformation of muscle into meat. Dealing with this problem is complicated since stress is a very complex disorder of animals, depending on too many intrinsic and extrinsic factors. Scope and approach To date, the most common stress indicators used were cortisol, creatine kinase and lactate in animal blood. However, currently there is an advanced development of proteomic techniques which enables us to obtain protein stress biomarkers, representing a powerful tool for food industry. In the literature, a large number of biomarkers could be identified in cattle, pigs or chicken linked to stress conditions. An integrative approach, based on functional enrichment analysis of biological processes, showed that the most relevant Gene Ontology term was “muscle filament sliding” for cattle and pig under stress conditions. Key findings and conclusions From a proteomic point of view, a list of biomarkers was provided to control animal welfare at industrial level. Heat stress during the rearing and pre-slaughter management turned out to be one of the most studied factors in pork, beef and chicken. This stressor provoked significant differences in structural contractile skeletal proteins, altering meat quality.