mEATquality.

The global images of meat production and quality are taking up an increasingly important place in recent years. These points mainly include animal welfare associated with husbandry systems, animal origin, and compliance with quality labels on the product. This has led to various “alternative” or “extensive” production systems and authentication solutions to address consumer expectations. Interactions among these systems are particularly important, in which synergies among the intrinsic and extrinsic factors can lead to specific myofiber characteristics and meat quality traits. Elucidating the factors that can influence meat quality and assessing quality traits such as texture, colour and water-holding capacity are critical for the meat industry in providing quality meat for consumers. In the last decade, given the development of high-throughput omics technologies in food science, it is believed that these approaches would be ideally placed to ensure the quality and authenticity of meat products. In this project, we propose the following activities in broiler meat: 1) Characterise and quantify key proteins to decipher the molecular mechanism underpinning meat quality traits related to animal welfare. 2) Study the molecular basis underlying differences in physical and biochemical characteristics of skeletal muscle fibres, which would unravel texture differences in response to extensification factors. 3) Authenticate the product under which different production systems by its muscle proteome profiling. The results will assist in the formulation of strategies to optimize meat quality and will also generate high-quality data that will contribute to the European Meat Database to help combat food fraud.