USA - bilateral collaboration on connective tissue and biospectroscopy

Meat and fish farming industries have both a great challenge in producing high quality food products regarding human and animal health as well as eating quality as textural properties. In food research, it is established that intramuscular connective tiss ue contributes to fish and meat texture and thereby to the main concerns of quality control such as tenderness in meat and gaping in fish flesh. The relationship between biochemical composition and structure of connective tissue with respect to the large variation in tenderness and gaping propensity in meat and fish flesh, is far from understood. In medical research, extracellular matrix (ECM) components as proteoglycans are established to play important roles in many biological and pathological condition s including organogenesis and growth control, cell adhesion, signaling, inflammation, tumor genesis and determining the structural properties of tendons and cartilage. The proposed project is aiming at starting a collaborative work between medical and foo d scientists working with connective tissue biochemistry and biospectroscopic techniques to determine important connective tissue parameters. Connective tissue parameters that are important for tenderization in meat and gaping in fish will be identified. The advantage of biospectroscopic methods is that they are fast and that they can be used in situ. This will in future provide tools to assess on-line raw meat and fish quality parameters to control further processing of the raw materials. In medical sci ence biospectroscopic techniques have been used for several years to assess important tissue parameters. One of the leading scientists in the field is our partner Nancy Camacho in New York.