Insights into Increasing Meat Production Using Omics Technologies

Dear Colleagues,

Meat animal production systems are constantly being challenged to improve the quantity and quality of products to satisfy consumers’ ever-growing appetite for more and better products—all while demanding a reduction in the use of valuable inputs and limiting impacts on the environment. To accomplish this lofty goal, the creation of new knowledge about muscle growth and meat quality development is absolutely essential if we are to realize gains necessary for feeding the burgeon global population by 2050. A systems-biology approach to studying animal production is a strategy for understanding the complexity of a myriad of biochemical and molecular mechanisms that change in the process of growing tissues that ultimately culminate into a highly nutritious and satiating food: meat. Factors include but are not restricted to feeding regime, genetics, stress, rearing environments, and harvesting and maturation conditions. Understanding the nature of these complex relationships and those variables that impinge on the process of producing high-quality lean meat need to be further understood if significant advances are to be realized in the future. In this regard, a muscle omics-based approach holds great potential to unravel the biochemical changes that occur in this valuable commodity during its production and maturation into meat. Therefore, this Special Issue aims to cover production animal livestock metabolomics and the integration with multi-omics to explore the complex interactions among various factors that impact animal performance and the quality of products produced from agronomically relevant species.

This Special Issue will also address sample preparation methods, advances in data processing, optimization for targeted and untargeted analysis, statistical data analysis using different platforms, and new frontiers and technological breakthroughs fostered by omics technologies. We strongly encourage the submission of research based on metabolic processes and networks, and on the integration with multi-omics and biomarkers discovery.

For this Special Issue of Metabolites, we invite original research papers and reviews that advance our knowledge and understanding of the complex processes that affect livestock biological systems, using varied omics approaches. We hope this Special Issue will contribute to the cutting-edge knowledge undergirding the production of high-quality food products from livestock.

We look forward to your contributions.

Prof. Dr. Saulo L. Silva
Dr. Nara Regina Brandão Cônsolo
Prof. Dr. David E. Gerrard
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

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• animal products
• biomarkers
• livestock
• lipidomics
• muscle metabolism
• metabolites
• metabolomics
• proteomics
• transcriptomics