In livestock farming slaughter age is important as meat sold from younger animals are often regarded as superior to the meat of older animals.
Eg. - Veal is expensive compared to beef similarly, lamb is priced higher than mutton.
Thus, authentication of slaughter age becomes critical for packaged/processed meat. Is there any methodology to determine the slaughter age for the meat sample received for testing?
Some comments on this question;
It is not the slaughter age of the meat! It is the age of the animal from which this meat is derived.
Another item is the time between slaughter and consumption/testing of the meat and the conditions (temperature/ humidity/time) of the storage.
Meat derived from younger animals is often found more tender, but also having less taste. So it depends on the balance between those two aspects which one is considered to be superior. This will most likely be quite dependent on the person that carries out that judgement
C.A. (Kees) Kan Well Dr Kan let the superiority of the meat be kept aside. My motive or intention is to determine the age of the animal from which given meat is derived using the meat as the test sample. Please let me know if you are aware of any such methodology.
Thanks
Yugendran
Some main differences between young and adult animals are (steroid) hormone levels and amounts of connective tissue.
I am not aware of any method to discriminate on these parameters between age groups.
C.A. (Kees) Kan Thanks I will consider this piece of information while designing my study.
It is not an easy to estimate the age of animal from meat samples. With increasing age, myglobine level will increase (dark meat colour), proportion of solubale collagen to unsoluble collag content, texture of meat, muscle bundles and structure (electron microscop) , proportion of the three muscle fiber types, pH of meat will chnage slighly due to amount of glycogen, meat quality (tenderness, juicness, myofibrial fragmantaion index, lightness, redness and yellowns of meat will chnage with increasing age, structure of connective tissues. All the baove suggestion will give some indactors that meat come from young or old animals, but not the exact age of animal.
When I noticed your question somehow epigenetics crossed my mind... so you might find interesting methods nowadays used in forensics, check https://www.forensicmag.com/article/2015/09/can-dna-testing-determine-age ... or https://nieuws.kuleuven.be/en/content/2015/blood-and-teeth-predict-age..
there is even some work here on researchgate: https://www.researchgate.net/project/Human-age-estimation; Article Forensic Individual Age Estimation with DNA: From Initial Ap...
sometimes it's good to check what other fields can offer :)good luck,
goran
I am glad.. it's a very good question you raised! Please let me know if you achieve something in that topic...
good luck,
goran
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