Sorting for beef tenderness using high performance liquid chromatography and capillary electrophoresis: A research note

This study utilized two sampling methods to examine changes in sarcoplasmic proteins during aging of beef and their relation to tenderness. Water-soluble proteins either obtained by manually expressing exudates from the meat (drip) or by an extraction procedure using homogenization and centrifugation (ext) were analyzed for longissimus lumborum muscle using HPLC and capillary electrophoresis (CE) on days 2, 7, 10 and 14 postmortem. A peak that consistently increased with aging was identified using HPLC. Among nine peaks detected in the CE analysis, peak 9 (100 kDa) that increased and peak 4 (30 kDa) that decreased with aging were correlated (P < 0.05) to tenderness as determined by Warner–Bratzler shear force (WBSF). For pooled data of all aging periods, drip sample explained the most variability (49%) in shear force compared to ext sample (25%) using HPLC analyses. At 2 days postmortem, a multiple linear regression model explained 83% of the variation in WBSF using CE-ext or HPLC-drip samples. Sixty percent of the variability in shear force was explained by CE-ext samples for day 7 data. The variability in shear force as explained by either drip or ext sample was less than 51 percent for 10 and 14 days postmortem data. The drip samples were comparable to ext samples in predicting WBSF values for both tough (>46 N WBSF on day 2) and tender (<46 N WBSF on day 2) strip loins using CE and HPLC procedure. Results suggest that a simple drip sampling may have a potential for use with either HPLC or CE analyses on day 2 postmortem for sorting carcasses into tenderness groups.