Role of muscle endopeptidases and their inhibitors in meat tenderness

Postmortem meat tenderness improvement is generally assumed to result from the softening of the myofibrillar structure by endogenous proteolytic enzymes. In this context, the present paper is a broad overview of the different peptidases so far identified in skeletal muscle, their specific inhibitors and their respective potential role in postmortem muscle. A series of petidase families have been thus considered including calpains, cathepsins, proteasomes, caspases, matrix metallopeptidases (MMP) and serine peptidases. (C) 2003 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.