With a Heart for Chicken and People
Sometimes chicken fillets become tough, yellowish, and don't taste good. When researchers try to find the solution, they can also help people with muscle diseases at the same time.
It’s called “wooden breast” – WB. In Norwegian, the disease has no name. But it is in Norway that the researchers are located who are trying to figure out how to prevent chickens with this disease ending up at the slaughterhouse, and in the worst case on your dinner table.
Understanding the Cause
“To achieve this, we need to understand the cause of the disease,” explains Mona E. Pedersen. She is a senior researcher at Nofima.
Pedersen and PhD student Lucie Pejšková are trying to figure out what happens. How can they detect that the chicken has WB before it reaches the slaughterhouse? And how can the chicken producers implement these findings into their breeding programs so that chickens that do not develop WB?
“Chicken is good to use for food because they don’t need much feed and because thefeed conversion ratio is low ,” says Pedersen. WB The focused efforts to enhance chicken meat production by increasing the growth rate have unfortunately led to the development of production-related diseases .. When it grows quickly, things can go wrong. It helps a bit to switch to chicken breeds that grow more slowly, but WB can appear in all breeds.
Detecting WB Too Late
Today, it is not possible to detect WB before the chicken is at the slaughterhouse. By then, it is too late. The fillets must be sorted out and discarded. It is not dangerous to eat chicken breast from a WB- chicken, but it does not taste good. Nor does it look appetizing.
“We are trying to uncover what happens before it gets that far and to find a marker that shows that it has the disease before it is slaughtered. We need to know more about the biology before we can solve the problem,” says Pedersen.
Lucie Pejšková points out that chicken meat is becoming more and more popular. “The Chicken grows quickly, it is sustainable, and it is accepted in the major religions,” she says. If they succeed with their research, it will make chicken production even more sustainable because less food will have to be discarded.
Proteins That Build Muscles
Pejšková studies the tissue in the chicken breast, but she also looks at the cells and each individual molecule. “We focus on syndecans,” she explains. Syndecans are a special group of proteins that have many different functions in the body, and they are important for renewing tissue.
“They are very important in muscle regeneration. If we can figure out how they behave, we can find a biomarker that can detect WB,” she says. A biomarker is a substance or molecule found in the body that indicates a disease or another condition.
If she succeeds, producers might be able to take a simple test and find out which chickens develop the disease. The researchers believe that both feeding and breeding can reduce the problem as soon as they know exactly what causes it.
Muscles and Heart Problems
But the research can provide answers to much more as well:
“We are definitely contributing to research that can increase knowledge about various muscle diseases. You can’t find a cure without knowing the mechanism. If we find a biomarker, it is a great start to identify what happens,” says Lucie Pejšková.
In addition, the Nofima researchers are collaborating with colleagues at Norwegian and international universities to see if their findings have similarities with other muscle diseases or heart diseases.
“We can use the findings in the food industry to improve meat quality, but we can also link them to diseases in humans,” says Pejšková.
Syndecans also play a role in heart diseases in humans. “We see a link here. We know that they are already studied in muscle diseases, but they are also reported to play a central role in heart diseases,” she concludes.
Chicken-Health og WB
Chicken-Health: Reduction of muscle deformities in chickens – a research project that investigates the molecular mechanisms that are crucial for some chickens to develop the disease Wooden Breast (WB).
Muscle deformities in chicken, or WB, are a serious problem both for animal welfare and for the profitability of chicken production.
Today, WB fillets are sorted only after the chicken has been slaughtered. These blankets often have to be thrown away because the quality is too low.
The researchers want to understand the biological mechanisms behind WB, so that they can develop tools that diagnose the disease early so that it is possible to lay the foundation for treatment and genetic improvements.
Chicken-Health is funded by the Research Council of Norway. Nofima is carrying out the project in collaboration with Stony Brook University in the US, NMBU in Ås and the institutes for experimental medical research and basic medical sciences at the University of Oslo.
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