Unlocking Value from Beef Exudate: Metabolomics profiling of beef exudate to delineate muscle-specific oxidative mechanisms

Discoloration of raw retail meat cuts diminishes the product value and consumer acceptability, as consumers discriminate against discolored meat even at low levels of surface browning. Therefore, prolonging the natural bright-red color is a major goal of the meat industry and retail markets. The discoloration problem is particularly critical for fresh cuts from long-term aged beef products. Our overall objective in this project is to delineate the biochemical mechanism underpinning muscle-specific aging response to meat color and oxidative stability in order to develop a novel biomarker-based prediction model. Our central hypothesis is that identifying key metabolic compounds in muscle tissue and exudate will provide crucial information to elucidate muscle-specific biochemical mechanisms. Our rationale is that successful completion of the proposed work will offer important and novel insight into the development of biomarker-based quality prediction systems derived from simple, valueless and easy to obtain meat exudate. We will accomplish our overall objective by addressing the following two specific research objectives:Objective 1: Establish the temporal biochemical changes that occur during postmortem muscle-specific aging and determine the relationship to meat color and oxidative stability.Objective 2: Identify key compounds present in beef muscle tissue and exudate associated with muscle-specific color stability with aging.Collectively, we expect that completion of the work under these two objectives will provide scientific insight and practical implications about how identified key metabolites from beef muscles and exudates could 1) advance our understanding of muscle-specific biochemical mechanisms and then 2) be used to develop biomarker-based prediction models to determine muscle-specific optimal aging practice.