In an effort to further understand of the differences of meat flavor and texture between Linwu ducks and Pekin ducks at market age, we investigated the meat metabolite composition of the two breeds of ducks using 600 MHz 1H nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy. Comprehensive multivariate data analysis including principal component analysis (PCA), partial least squares discriminant analysis (PLS-DA), and orthogonal projection to latent structure-discriminant analysis (OPLS-DA) were applied to analyze the 1H-NMR profiling data to identify the distinguishing metabolites of breast meat between two breeds of ducks. Compared with 42-d-old Pekin duck meat, breast from 72-d-old Linwu duck has higher concentration of anserine, carnosine, homocarnosine, and nicotinamide, but significantly lower concentration of succinate, creatine, and myo-inositol. These results contribute to a better understanding of the differences in meat metabolite composition between 72-d-old Linwu and 42-d-old Pekin ducks, which could be used to help assess the quality of duck meat as a food.
Keywords: duck meat; metabolite profiling; multivariate data analysis; nuclear magnetic resonance.
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