ABSTRACT
Meat quality includes many factors including palatability, water-holding capacity, color, and nutritional value (Hopkins and Geesink 2009) and it can be affected by changing the genetics and the production and processing environments. The relative importance of meat quality traits varies according to the user of the product and the type of product. For example, tenderness is more important for beef (Thompson 2002) than sheep meat (Hopkins et al. 2005b). As improvements are made in individual traits their relative importance changes (Thompson 2004), which impacts on their emphasis in breeding programs. Market research indicates that meat quality traits are becoming more important to consumers (Pethick et al. 2006; Bermingham et al. 2008) and this will increase the focus on methods to improve them.
