About this Research Topic

Background

The field of skeletal muscle development and meat science is of significant importance, given that skeletal muscle accounts for 40% of body weight and serves as the primary source of animal protein for human consumption. It plays a pivotal role in maintaining animal metabolic health and enhancing meat production and quality. Despite its importance, there are ongoing challenges in improving meat production capacity, particularly in the pig industry, while also ensuring excellent carcass and meat quality traits. These challenges form a crucial part of modern livestock molecular breeding concerns and require urgent solutions. The complex molecular regulatory network that underpins meat quality traits presents a bottleneck that needs to be addressed in animal science.

This research topic aims to broaden our understanding of the genetic and environmental factors that control or regulate skeletal muscle fiber growth and metabolism. These factors include animal breed, nutrition, ambient temperature, and medical care. By gaining a comprehensive understanding of these factors, we can significantly improve current farm animal management practices, particularly in chickens, pigs, and cattle, for meat production, intramuscular fat deposition, and meat science. The goal is to encourage authors to submit papers focusing on skeletal muscle development and meat quality related to omics studies, such as genome, transcriptome, methylome, proteomics, and gut microbiome studies. All studies should be supported by phenotypic data, not just molecular and omics-related studies.

To gather further insights into skeletal muscle development and meat science, we welcome articles addressing, but not limited to, the following themes: identification of meat phenotypes in livestock and poultry, omics study on meat quality, differentiation of skeletal muscle, functional study of skeletal muscle exosomes, types and transformations of muscle fibers, metabolic and endocrine control of muscle development and meat science, and other relevant aspects of skeletal muscle and meat science.

Keywords: Skeletal muscle

Important note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.

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