Novel Non-Contact Spectroscopy to Ensure Freshness in the Beef Supply Chain

Abstract This multi-institutional research proposal entitled “Novel non-contact spectroscopy to study interior beef color and minimize beef waste” addresses USDA AFRI Foundational Program’s program area priority area “Novel Foods and Innovative Manufacturing Technologies” (Program Area Priority Code: A1364). In this subaward to University of Kentucky, Dr. Suman will attempt to apply innovative proteomic technologies to characterize proteome basis of color variations in beef muscles. Extensive work from our lab indicated that differential abundance of muscle proteome influences beef color stability (Joseph et al., 2012; Canto et al., 2015; Nair et al., 2016; Nair et al., 2018a,b). The recent study from our program (Wang et al., 2020) observed that beef myoglobin undergoes posttranslational modification in postmortem longissimus lumborum muscles and these modifications impact color stability of steaks. Together, these studies highlighted the importance of muscle proteome in beef color stability. Two-dimensional electrophoresis will be utilized to separate sarcoplasmic proteins (Nair et al., 2018a,b), and proteins exhibiting differential abundance (> 2 fold difference) in the color-stable and color-labile beef muscles will be subjected to tandem mass spectrometry to establish the proteins’ identity as well as post-translational modifications in them. This innovative approach will provide valuable information on the role of muscle proteome and post-translational modifications in beef color stability variations within an economically important muscle. These findings will enable beef industry to engineer novel processing strategies to improve color stability, and thus minimize food waste as well as carbon footprint and also contribute to sustainability of beef production.