Prediction of beef eating quality in Europe

Summary

The primary purpose of this project was to build expertise, through the utilisation of an Australian PhD student, within the European beef meat science environment. The ProSafeBeef project has bought together teams of beef meat science experts to form a strong world standing consortium of expertise. Moreover there is also significant collaboration between Australian beef meat science researchers with several members of the ProSafeBeef team. A key aim is to maintain this collaboration as ProSafeBeef comes to a conclusion and one efficient mechanism is to collaborate around the supervision of an Australian funded PhD student. Ideally this collaboration would encompass researchers in France, Poland, republic of Ireland and the UK (specifically Northern Ireland).

The beef industry in the above mentioned European countries has made significant investments into consumer testing of beef using the Meat Standards Australia (MSA) protocols. Moreover further testing of beef is being planned in collaborations between France and Poland to further understand the biology behind the effects of gender (steers vs bulls), animal age (heifers vs older cows) and extreme breeds (pure bred French and dairy) on the consumer rating of beef cuts. The French scientists have also developed strong genomic tools for both phenotypic and genotypic prediction of beef quality and yield of saleable meat. This combination of research opportunities i.e. meat quality of cattle types not previously tested using MSA protocols, in combination with genetic/phenotypic prediction, is proposed as a significant PhD training opportunity for the Australian beef industry.