£400,000 spent to improve Sunday roast
A £400,000 study into improving the taste and texture of meat will mean your roast dinner could soon be packed with bags more natural flavour, say scientists.
The three-year research at the University of Nottingham will look at how muscle fibre types impact the appearance, texture and taste of the meat that we eat.
The boffins say meat tastes different because of the speed at which it grows, slow muscle fibres have flavour intensity and tenderness while meat from fast muscle fibres is considered to be tougher and drier.
They are now trying to develop ways to breed tasty animals faster.
"Genetically, we have been very successful in breeding animals that can grow very quickly but the down side is that comes at the price of eating quality," said Veterinary Medicine and Science Professor Kin-Chow Chang.
"The work we are doing focuses on finding out more at a molecular level about how fast muscle can switch to slow muscle and could lead to a better understanding of how to genetically choose animals for breeding that will produce better quality meat."
Funded with more than £400,000 from the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council the Chang and co are concentrating on a particular cell signalling pathway called the calcineuring pathway which, if stimulated, causes muscle to switch from fast to slow.
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