Role of postmortem bioenergetics in beef colour chemistry

Abstract

Meat colour is one of the primary factors affecting the acceptability of retail meat cuts. Therefore, displaying the natural bright-red colour of meat is a major goal of the meat industry. Consumers frequently reject to retail meat cuts with discolouration even at low levels of surface browning and/or darkening, which in turn results in significant food waste and economic loss. Thus, understanding the factors that influence meat colour deviations such as discolouration or darkening is crucial in developing effective strategies to minimise the display colour-related quality issues. Numerous factors influence series of biochemical reactions of post-mortem muscles and the chemical state of myoglobin, which ultimately affects meat colour and colour stability. Recent studies have demonstrated the incidence of dark-cutting beef post-mortem can be attributed to the combination of lower glycolytic potential, less glycolytic metabolites, enzymes and dysregulated energy metabolism. This review will focus on the role of post-mortem bioenergetics and mitochondria dynamics that affect beef colour chemistry.

Keywords:

• Meat colour
• bioenergetics
• energy metabolism
• dark-cutter
• mitochondria dynamics
• integrated omics

Ethical approval

Since this is a review article, no particular new research, which require an ethical approval, has been conducted for this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

The data presented in this study are available on request from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported, in part, by the Agriculture and Food Research Institute [Grant 2021-09413 and 2019-06821] from the USDA National Institute of Food and Agriculture program.