This study examined the effects of pre-slaughter fasting, chasing stress and chiller ageing on objective meat quality, and their relations to the proteome profile of longissimus muscle using 20 male Korean native black pigs. Treatments were composed of two levels of pre-slaughter feed withdrawal, two levels of pre-slaughter stress and four chiller ageing times. A 15 min chasing stress immediately prior to slaughter significantly (p<0.05) decreased detectable levels of mu-calpain activity during rigor development and chiller ageing, but did not have any direct effect on objective meat quality. On the other hand, pigs fed until the morning of slaughter resulted in significantly (p<0.05) higher hunter L* value and cooking loss than those which received an 18 h feed withdrawal prior to slaughter. Cooking loss and hunter L* value were constant during 7 d of chiller ageing, followed by significant increases at 14 d. The fed aminals showed a significantly (p<0.05) higher hunter a* value at both 3 and 7 d, while the other group maintained a stable redness for 7 d. WB-shear force was not affected by the pre-slaughter treatments, but had significant (p<0.05) linear reduction from 1 to 7 d. A gel-based proteome analysis was performed on selected animals for low and high hunter L* values at 1 d. Ten and five spots had greater than two-fold spot densities for the low and high hunter L* groups, respectively. The ten spots included chain A, deoxyribounclease 1 complex with actin, heat shock protein 27 kDa, a protein similar to cardiac Ca2+ release channel, and myosin heavy chain, while the five spots included chain A aldehyde dehydrogenase, glycerol-3 phosphate dehydrogenase, and hemoglobin alpha chain. In general, feeding until the morning of slaughter resulted in more desirable meat color, but appeared to reduce palatability due to increased cooking loss. Proteome analysis demonstrated that various proteins were concomitantly involved in the determination of final meat color. The most noticeable observation in the current study was that various isoforms for a particular protein differed in degradation and/or expression rate depending on meat quality.
