Omics technologies in poultry meat quality: Advancements in the molecular basis of breast myopathies

The broiler industry represents one of the most biologically and technologically advanced sectors in the global production of terrestrial animal-derived foods. Its success is closely linked to the remarkable improvements achieved in the past 60 yrs in genetic selection, nutrition, housing, and meat processing, from slaughter to product packaging. Today, these advancements allow the birds to fully express their genetic potential while ensuring exceptional outcomes throughout the supply chain in terms of product quality and production efficiency. Among these aspects, meat quality is a key factor in the global success of chicken meat, owing to its cost-competitiveness, nutritional profile, versatility, and acceptability to diverse culinary traditions. In this context, understanding the molecular and physiological pathways involved in determining meat quality is essential for implementing integrated management strategies aimed at preserving and enhancing the production chain. In this regard, the outstanding progress in high-throughput (HT) technologies, which has greatly advanced the investigation of complex phenotype and conditions in other species (including humans), is currently also finding important applications in meat quality research. Indeed, these technologies, such as HT sequencing, can help unravel the molecular mechanisms underlying major meat quality traits as well as some of the most relevant quality issues and abnormalities. More specifically, several omics approaches (e.g., genomics, transcriptomics, proteomics, and metabolomics) have been widely used to investigate the complex biological processes underlying meat quality. For instance, studies applying omics technologies have deepened our understanding of the molecular mechanisms involved in growth-related breast myopathies affecting fast-growing broilers (i.e., white striping, woody breast, and spaghetti meat). Over the past 15 yrs, a substantial body of literature has documented the concurrent and sequential occurrence of multiple biological, physiological, and metabolic events associated with the development of these myopathies, thus highlighting the complexity of their etiology. These advances have been made possible by remarkable progress in omics technologies, especially transcriptomics and proteomics, combined with powerful bioinformatic approaches (e.g., Weighted Co-expression Network Analysis; WGCNA). Comparing to 30 yrs ago, these developments have enabled unprecedented insight into the dissection of complex biological traits. This talk therefore aims to provide an update overview of the mechanisms underlying these conditions, with particular emphasis on recent transcriptomic and proteomic findings.