The Effect of Muscle Pathogenesis on Avian Physiology, Animal Welfare, and Quality of Muscle as a Food

Over the past several decades, the poultry industry has achieved huge improvements in global poultry production, including with increased growth performance, improved body composition, higher market weight, increased feed efficiency, reduced production costs, and increased profitability for growers. These gains have resulted from a combination of intensive genetic selection, tailored nutritional approaches, and novel poultry management strategies. However, these improvements in broiler chicken and turkey production have also come with costs. These costs include increased susceptibility to environmental stress, increased mortality in commercial poultry flocks, and muscle pathogenesis, ultimately, leading to deleterious effects on meat quality traits affecting appearance, texture, and protein functionality. For example, a subset of fast-growing domestic turkeys develops spontaneous cardiomyopathy or round heart disease that leads to a mortality rate up to ~15% at 2 to 4 weeks of age. Even turkeys that survive the critical first two weeks after hatch already have damaged hearts at a prevalence of 80% to 90% which may lead to growth retardation during the grow-out phase. This syndrome can also occur in broiler chickens which causes major economic losses and limits the maximum profitability in the poultry industry world-wide. Another example is wooden breast, an abnormal muscle condition resulting in a hardening of the breast muscle affecting meat texture. Other examples include green muscle disease, also known as deep pectoral muscle myopathy, spaghetti meat, and white striping. All of these pathologies include the development of myopathic changes, subsequently affecting meat quality, leading to consumer complaints and economic losses by the processing industry.

There is a paucity of information on the etiologies of broiler and turkey muscle pathogenesis and their consequent effects on muscle physiology. This Research Topic will highlight the mechanisms of skeletal and cardiac muscle pathogenesis in poultry that are responsible for premature bird mortality and altered quality of muscle as a food.

This research topic will cover the recent findings in the area of myopathies in poultry. Original Research and Review papers, among other article types, are welcome to be submitted to this collection.