ABSTRACT
Over the next decade, global meat supply will be mainly from poultry production (Whitton et al., 2021). Global consumption of meat proteins is expected to increase by 14% by 2030, with poultry meat accounting for about 41% of all protein sources by that point (OECD/FAO, 2021). To meet growing consumer demand, breeding companies have put great effort into improving the productive performance of modern broiler chickens (Havenstein et al., 2003). However, these improvements have indirectly led to the development of several muscular defects mainly affecting modern chicken hybrids: so-called ‘growth-related abnormalities’ (Petracci et al., 2019). Among them, wooden breast (WB) is a globally challenging meat quality issue (Hubert and Athrey, 2020), which mainly affects the Pectoralis major (PM) muscle of broilers selected for rapid growth and high breast yield (Griffin et al., 2018; Petracci et al., 2015; Caldas-Cueva and Owens, 2020).
