New techniques for predicting meat quality.

Quality concept is becoming an important factor for meat industry in our country. Several techniques have been used to determine the quality of meat and meat products for many years. Although traditional methods play an important role for determination of meat quality, mechanical methods such as ultrasound, spectroscopic methods such as nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) and near-infrared spectroscopy (NIR), and several new molecular biological and immunological techniques have been applied alternatively. These methods can either measure meat component properties directly, or calculate them indirectly by using obvious correlations between one or several measurements and meat component properties. In this article, these new techniques and their applications were reviewed.