Serine peptidase inhibitors, the best predictor of beef ageing amongst a large set of quantitative variables

For consumers, tenderness is the most important sensory attribute of beef meat and, though to a lesser extent, of pork. Tenderness is therefore by far the most common cause of its unacceptability. The major challenge for the beef industry is to evaluate the toughness of the meat as soon as possible after death. In this context, the aim of the present work was to develop an equation to predict the myofibrillar ultimate resistance of raw meat. The study was done on the Longissimus muscle from twenty three 19 months-old Charolais bulls grown in the same INRA farm. Muscles excised within 1h post-mortem were vacuum packed and stored at 15°C during 24h and then transferred to 4°C until used. The activities of lactate dehydrogenase, citrate synthase and myofibrillar Mg-Ca dependent ATPase, the levels of lactate dehydrogenase enzyme, myoglobin, myosin types I, IIa and IIb, cysteine and serine peptidase inhibitors, the pH, the osmolarity, the expressible juice, μ-calpain, m-calpain and calpastatin and meat toughness were measured. According to the physical method used here, the force measured on raw meat represents the resistance of the myofibillar structure. Stepwise linear regression was used to determine the best equation (p<0.05) for predicting toughness at 6 days post-mortem. A 6-variables predictive equation including serine peptidase inhibitors (partial R(2)=0.4), the rate (partial R(2)=0.25), and the extent of pH decline (partial R(2)=0.03), the at death LDH activity (partial R(2)=0.24), the extent of increase in osmotic pressure (partial R(2)=0.13), and the rate of μ-calpain activity loss (partial R(2)=0.09), explained 70% of the variability in meat toughness at 6 days post-mortem. This equation was developed from 20 animals and the other 3 animals, chosen randomly, were used to validate it. The absolute need for a predictive model of meat toughness and the nature of the serine peptidase inhibitors together with their potential target enzymes are discussed.