Please join us for the Faculty Candidate Seminar for the position in the area of Meat Science/Muscle Biology. Dr.Marcio Duarte will be delivering a seminar titled "Understanding skeletal muscle development to improve the quality of meat".

Abstract

Historically, research in meat animals been devoted to increase skeletal muscle mass aiming to increase meat production. As a consequence, several meat quality attributes were compromised along the years, such as tenderness, juiciness, and marbling. To address such impairment, strategies (e.g. nutrition, crossbreeding, meat aging, etc.) have been developed to better align animal performance to the meat quality traits desired by consumers. However, in some cases the use of these strategies are costly and not as effective as expected. Since skeletal muscle development is a very dynamic process, the understanding of mechanisms underlying it is crucial for the develop of new or improvement of the available tools used to enhance meat quality traits. Moreover, it has been established that the myogenic, adipogenic, and fibrogenic cells are derived from the same pool of mesenchymal stem cells. Thus, mechanisms controlling cell fate in the skeletal muscle needs to be understood to more precisely and accurately improving carcass and meat quality traits. Therefore, the aim of this seminar is to present a research overview on muscle biology that align basic and applied science within a meat science area.