Developmental Cellular Programming: stage-specific architecting muscle and adipose tissues for high-quality meat...

The rising global demand for animal protein has driven intensive selection for rapid growth and leanness, often at the expense of meat quality and animal health. Achieving high-quality meat production with optimal intramuscular fat (IMF) and superior myofiber characteristics remains a major challenge in animal agriculture. Here, we propose a holistic conceptual framework termed Developmental Cellular Programming (DCP), which utilizes distinct developmental windows to precisely regulate skeletal muscle and adipose tissue formation in meat animals. Unlike traditional late-stage finishing strategies, the DCP framework operates as a coordinated, stage-specific pipeline: optimizing maternal nutrition during gestation to maximize prenatal myofiber hyperplasia and initiate adipocyte lineages; executing targeted neonatal interventions to drive microenvironment-mediated adipogenic precursor expansion and angiogenesis; and fine-tuning nutrient allocation during the finishing phase to control cellular hypertrophy and lipid deposition. Within this framework, vascularization is established as a critical, shared control point that coordinates multi-tissue niches to synchronize myofiber and adipocyte development. While advanced three-dimensional cell culture models, such as vascularized tissue organoids, have emerged as powerful platforms for high-throughput screening of key candidate metabolic modulators, bridging the gap to livestock production necessitates translating these cellular responses into whole-animal phenotypes. We propose that future research should focus on conducting in vivo animal trials to elucidate how various nutrients regulate muscle and adipose cell differentiation at specific developmental stages, thereby establishing precision nutritional strategies based on the DCP theory for high-quality meat production.