Stress Effects on Meat Quality: A Mechanistic Perspective

Abstract

Stress inevitably occurs from the farm to abattoir in modern livestock husbandry. The effects of stress on the behavioral and physiological status and ultimate meat quality have been well documented. However, reports on the mechanism of stress effects on physiological and biochemical changes and their consequent effects on meat quality attributes have been somewhat disjointed and limited. Furthermore, the causes of variability in meat quality traits among different animal species, muscle fibers within an animal, and even positions within a piece of meat in response to stress are still not entirely clear. This review 1st summarizes the primary stress factors, including heat stress, preslaughter handling stress, oxidative stress, and other stress factors affecting animal welfare; carcass quality; and eating quality. This review further delineates potential stress‐induced pathways or mediators, including AMP‐activated protein kinase‐mediated energy metabolism, crosstalk among calcium signaling pathways and reactive oxygen species, protein modification, apoptosis, calpain and cathepsin proteolytic systems, and heat shock proteins that exert effects that cause biochemical changes during the early postmortem period and affect the subsequent meat quality. To obtain meat of high quality, further studies are needed to unravel the intricate mechanisms involving the aforementioned signaling pathways or mediators and their crosstalk.

Effect of chestnut wood extract on performance, meat quality, antioxidant status, immune function, and cholesterol metabolism in broilers

“…Oxidative stress is defined as the rise in reactive oxygen species level, which could reduce the live weight gain via altering normal metabolism and cause poor meat quality by increasing plasma corticosterone level which is associated with paler breast meat in broilers ( Kannan et al., 1997 ). In addition, oxidative stress induces biological damage to DNA, proteins, and lipids and is responsible for several health problems that affect growth performance and productivity of livestock ( Xing et al., 2019 ). In a recent study, Ebrahim et al.…”

Evaluation of suitable temperature range for post‐harvest processing of mud crabs through cardiac performance

“…This phenomenon has been explained in terms of biochemical reactions. Stress‐related signalling pathways and mediators, like AMP‐activated protein kinase‐mediated energy metabolism, protein modification, apoptosis, calpain and cathepsin proteolytic systems, and heat shock proteins, exert effects on post‐mortem energy metabolism, protein modification and proteolysis, cause muscle structure changes (Xing, Gao, Tume, Zhou, & Xu, ). Our data suggest that crabs should be kept as consistently as possible at 14–18°C.…”

The Increase of Short-term Heat Exposure Temperature at Extreme Range Decreased Phosphofructokinase-1 Activity and AMPK Phosphorylation in Postmortem Chicken Breast Muscle

“…To the best of our knowledge, the current study is the rst one to report a lower PFK1 activity and phosphorylation of AMPK-α[Thr172] in chicken PM muscle from birds exposed to SHE of 40 °C compared to 36 °C. This decreased p-AMPK-α[Thr172] and PFK1 activity in the 40 °C group could be attributed to proteotoxic stress response due to preslaughter extreme heat exposure, which can inhibit p-AMPKα[Thr172] and activate heat shock factor 1 to increase the expression of heat shock proteins [8,47], a set of proteins that can protect muscle cell from calcium overload, cell death signaling, and proteolysis and preserve meat quality [48]. In chicken PM muscle, heat shock protein 70 (Hsp70), a member of heat shock family, has been considered as a protective protein due to its higher abundance in normal meat than defective meat [49][50][51].…”