This course is an advanced course in the field of muscle biology and meat science. We recommend that you brush up your knowledges in biochemistry and energy metabolism before starting. This will help you to follow the course. You can find more information concerning specific subjects by klicking on a underlined word, or searching on the whole internet by pushing the button: Net Search above.

The subject for this course is Modeling Meat Quality, is what is the so-called muscle post mortal metabolism, or glycolysis, that takes place when living muscle tissue from meat animals is converted into meat after slaughter. One very important meat quality factor is the water-holding capacity, and it is well known that a high drip loss of water from the muscle during the biochemical processes after slaughter are caused by denaturation of the muscle proteins. To describe the time-course of myosin denaturation during the post mortal process when muscle is converted to meat, a prediction model based on known relationships between the rate of the denaturation of myosin, and temperature and pH fall, will be used in this course. In addition to this, we will also look upon the dependence of how the fraction of myosin denatured at rigor mortis is dependent on the rate and extent of glycolysis and on the chilling regime.

The calculations described here are ment to help to rationalise several key aspects of processing practice and to explain certain previously puzzling phenomena connected with what is called PSE-meat. Seemingly unrelated features of processing to achieve optimal meat quality have been brought together under a reasonably simple and predictive model. This could be used to predict the amount of drip loss associated with various treatments of the carcass, thereby define the critical conditions that have to be fulfilled if the severity of PSE is to be ameliorated.

For this course, we have used Netscape Navigator Gold Version 3.01Gold as the platform where illustrations, texts, and links to other information available on the Internet World Wide Web, are integreated to visulise and simplyfy the understanding of important relationships between the post mortem muscle metabolism and meat quality.

To get your copy of Netscape Navigator, push the button: .

This course is given by the Department of Food Science at SLU the Food Internet-based Distance European Learning (FIDEL) Network co-ordinated from the Department of Food Engineering, Lund University, Sweden within the EU Socrates projekt, subprogram Open & Distance Learning.

Main page Next page