Dear Colleagues,

Muscle is a major source of protein for humans. Currently, as food supplies are more plentiful, meat quality is becoming increasingly important to consumers. Today, we know that meat quality is the result of many factors, such as animal nutrition, rearing and slaughter, and genotype. The long-term intensive selection of livestock and poultry, aimed at improving weight gain and dressing percentage in increasingly short periods of time, has contributed to undesirable metabolic and physiological disorders in the muscle tissue microstructure, which have adversely affected meat quality. Theories concerning the problem of increasing meatiness and decreasing meat quality in livestock and poultry often use research on muscle tissue microstructures and genetics at the molecular level. It is exactly these muscle microstructure parameters, in particular, muscle fiber composition, intramuscular fat content, and intramuscular connective tissue, that determine the physico-chemical parameters of meat (such as acidity, color, tenderness, drip loss, and water holding capacity) and thus its quality. It is generally accepted that during the conversion of muscle to meat, postmortem changes that occur in the muscle tissue and determine the subsequent production and culinary usefulness of the meat are dependent, among other things, on the rate of myofibrillar and cytoskeletal protein degradation. In the last decade, proteomic analyses have shown that protein degradation is associated with energy metabolism, cellular death cascades (apoptosis or autophagy), cellular survival (heat shock and chaperone proteins), and oxidative stress. Elucidation of these processes and their impacts on postmortem muscle proteins, as well as their inherent interactions, is key to understanding the mechanisms that influence meat quality.

This Special Issue welcomes both review and research papers on all aspects of the relationship between meat structure, protein expression, and meat quality. Areas of interest include the effect of breed, line, gender, nutrition, aging time, muscle type, etc. on meat quality and its structure and rate of protein degradation. Topics of special interest are the muscle development and growth mechanisms of livestock and poultry as related to muscle myopathies and meat quality.

I invite you to share your recent findings in this Special Issue.

Prof. Dorota Wojtysiak
Guest Editor

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• meat quality
• microstructure
• muscle type
• skeletal muscle proteins
• postmortem aging
• muscle myopathies
• apoptosis
• oxidative stress
• heat shock proteins
• breed
• nutrition