Proteome profile of glycrol-mediated salt-reduction cured meat reveals the formation mechanism of eating quality.

Although it has been ignored for some time, mediated curing has an impact on the quality of dry-cured meat products, and the understanding of such impact can be beneficial to the development of low-sodium cured meat products. In this paper, the effect of glycerol (a curing mediator) on the quality of cured meat was investigated. The results revealed that the curing mediated by glycerol could reduce the contents of salt and water and the hardness of cured meat (P < 0.05). Further, the influence of glycerol-mediated curing on muscle protein was evaluated by tandem mass tag quantitative proteomics, and the proteome profiles of tenderloin in the glycerol-mediated curing and control groups were compared. The results showed that the upregulated differentially expressed proteins (DAPs) in glycerol-mediated cured tenderloin were mainly involved in oxidative phosphorylation and thermogenesis pathways from the Gene Ontology (GO) and the Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes (KEGG) databases. In addition, the downregulated DAPs were mainly involved in the regulation of actin cytoskeleton. These DAPs and the participated pathways were related to meat characteristics. Based on the results, it is convincing that glycerol-mediated curing is an effective method for producing low-sodium cured meat products.