The American Meat Science Association (AMSA) is pleased to announce, Drs. Jessica Prenni, Andy King and Ranjith Ramanathan will be the featured speakers at the AMSA 70^th Reciprocal Meat Conference (RMC) Muscle Biology Symposium: “-omic” Approaches to Solve Meat Quality Issues, on Wednesday, June 21, in College Station, Texas sponsored by Iowa State University. The speakers in this symposium will focus on the topics below:

• Mass Spectrometry “Omics” Technologies and Their Potential for Meat Quality Research – A Tutorial: Mass Spectrometry (MS) based “omics” technologies such as proteomics and metabolomics offer the capacity to characterize biological systems at the molecular level.  Further, these technologies are often more reflective of environmental effects and phenotype than complementary genetic based analysis – thus providing the opportunity to identify and investigate molecular profiles in the context of quality metrics.  Dr. Jessica Prenni, Director of Core Research Facilities and Associate Professor at Colorado State University, will provide an overview of MS technologies and discuss opportunities and challenges for using these approaches in meat quality research.
• Using “Omics” Technology to Address Meat Quality Issues: Proteomics, metabolomics, transcriptomics, and genomics are powerful tools that can help elucidate the biological basis for phenotypic variation in meat quality attributes.  These technologies can facilitate the movement beyond more traditional approaches in expanding the existing knowledge of meat quality traits.  However, the sensitivity of these techniques makes experimental design critical to obtaining the desired results.  In this talk, Dr. Andy King, a Research Food Technologist at U.S. Meat Animal Research Center, will focus on approaches to experimental design for proteomic, metabolomic, genomic and transcriptomic experiments to address meat quality questions.
• Metabolomics of Fresh Meat Color: The bright red color of fresh beef is associated with freshness and wholesomeness. Postmortem muscle is biochemically active, and the enzymes involved in beef color retain their activity. However, metabolites/substrates for these enzymes are depleted over time. Hence characterizing the changes in metabolites will improve our understanding on the mechanism of meat discoloration. In this talk, Dr. Ranjith Ramanathan, Assistant Professor at Oklahoma State University, will focus on the use of the novel tools in metabolomics to study the critical role of metabolites (such as glycolytic and TCA substrates, amino acids, sugar, and lipids) in fresh meat color.

The AMSA 70^th RMC will be held June 18-21, 2017 at Texas A&M University in College Station, Texas. For more information regarding the AMSA 70^th RMC please visit: http://www.meatscience.org/rmc or contact Deidrea Mabry 1-800-517-AMSA ext. 12.

Source: AMSA