Application of Proteomic Technologies to Assess the Quality of Raw Pork and Pork Products: An Overview from Farm-To-Fork

SIMPLE SUMMARY: The swine industry has an important interest in becoming more efficient and innovative, fitting with the consumer demand in terms of pork quality, meat pig welfare conditions, and the environmental aspects. This paper deals with the productive (breed, diet, stress) and technological (aging, cooking) factors that affect fresh pork and elaborates the quality of products by using proteomic tools for assessing. These technologies are a relevant approach in the meat science field to decipher the underlying mechanisms and post-mortem changes in the muscle and biofluids proteome of pigs because their study will allow better management of the outcomes such as meat quality variation and defects. In general, these new developments in molecular techniques can help researchers to control and assess this quality through biomarkers. Additionally, as food safety and pork product authentication/adulteration to avoid fraud can be evaluated with these high-throughput proteomic tools, hence they were tackled. Finally, another relevant point addressed focused on the search of bioactive peptides with a beneficial effect on human health from added-value products such as dry-cured ham. Overall, this review describes the current and emerging proteomics studies dealing with raw pork and pork products from the farm to fork. ABSTRACT: The quality assurance of pork meat and products includes the study of factors prior to slaughter such as handling practices, diet and castration, and others during the post-mortem period such as aging, storage, and cooking. The development over the last two decades of high-throughput techniques such as proteomics offer great opportunities to examine the molecular mechanisms and study a priori the proteins in the living pigs and main post-mortem changes and post-translational modifications during the conversion of the muscle into the meat. When the most traditional crossbreeding and rearing strategies to improve pork quality were assessed, the main findings indicate that metabolic pathways early post-mortem were affected. Among the factors, it is well documented that pre-slaughter stress provokes substantial changes in the pork proteome that led to defective meat, and consequently, novel protein biomarkers should be identified and validated. Additionally, modifications in pork proteins had a strong effect on the sensory attributes due to the impact of processing, either physical or chemical. Maillard compounds and protein oxidation should be monitored in order to control proteolysis and volatile compounds. Beyond this, the search of bioactive peptides is becoming a paramount goal of the food and nutraceutical industry. In this regard, peptidomics is a major tool to identify and quantify these peptides with beneficial effects for human health.