Proteome profile of economically important muscles in beef hindquarters

The objectives of this proposal are: (1) To profile soluble and insoluble proteomes of muscles (SM, ST, BF, PM, and LL) in beef hindquarters; (2) To characterize the changes in muscle proteomes during wet-aging; (3) To determine the correlation between muscle proteomes and beef quality traits. High-throughput proteomic tools, including two-dimensional electrophoresis, gel image analyses, mass spectrometry, and bioinformatics, will be employed to accomplish the goals. Characterizing the proteome basis for muscle-specificity in beef quality will aid engineering muscle-specific processing strategies (aging, antioxidant, enhancement, packaging, and cooking) for improving beef quality and to maximize the use of individual whole-muscles.