Proteomics to explain and predict meat quality

Proteomics, one of the foodomics techniques, represents a comprehensive characterization of all, or a partial set of, expressed proteins present in a tissue or a fluid sample and/or in a biological system interacting with the studied matrix or fluid at any given time in an organism. Proteomics has been extensively used in the last 20 years in the field of meat quality, allowing significant advances in our understanding of the mechanisms behind muscle-to-meat conversion. It further allowed deciphering the underlying pathways in meat quality variation and quality defects. This technology, based on the separation and identification of proteins in a sample, is used for several other objectives. It allows the comparison of extreme groups for a given meat quality trait to reveal putative biomarkers that can be used for the management of this trait. Coupled with bioinformatics tools, it allowed a deeper understanding of the mechanisms involved in the determination of the traits of interest. Finally, thanks to the development of protein quantification techniques based on immunochemistry or recent mass targeted proteomics due to the advanced spectrometry techniques, it can be applied for the validation of the putative biomarkers and the prediction of several meat quality traits. Therefore, proteomics has been successfully applied to propose explanatory mechanisms giving rise to the variability of several eating quality traits of meat, most notably beef tenderness. This chapter highlights the different applications of proteomics including the current knowledge gained thanks to the integration of proteomics studies in the frame of integromics in the field of meat quality.