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A Carleton University chemistry lab is looking for ways to keep a bad smell out of pork, without having to castrate piglets.
Once they reach adolescence, male pigs start producing two chemicals that produce a foul smell when the meat is cooked. The smell is known as “boar taint,” and comes from the chemicals skatole and androstenone.
People compare the smell to manure, sweat and urine, and chemistry professor Maria DeRosa is looking for a simple, cheap way to avoid it.
“This boar taint is in male pigs. So either the farmers don’t send those off for us to eat, or they castrate them (as piglets) so that they won’t produce those hormones and we won’t get that effect,” she said.
“I guess already in Europe they are banning these castrations, and that’s going to be coming here to Canada too.”
One response is to detect animals with higher levels of the chemicals that cause boar taint and remove them from breeding stock. Another would be to test a carcass early in the production cycle, before it is packaged and sold.
But how? Humans can’t smell these chemicals in raw meat.
DeRosa listened to ideas the industry was kicking around. “Some of them were really out of this world, like training wasps to smell the compounds,” she said. She felt there was a better way.
She’s now working on test strips with chemicals that react visibly to traces of the two compounds. It’s like a home pregnancy test kit that turns colour when it detects certain hormones.
And the irony of a pregnancy-style test for male animals? “I love it! That’s exactly what it is!”
“That sort of technology wouldn’t be difficult to implement in a meat-processing plant or even on a farm,” she said. “You could send kits in the mail. They’re just strips of paper, spotted with these aptamers” (chemicals that react to the hormones).
“That makes better-tasting meat.”
Technically androstenone is a male hormone while skatole is hormone-like, but researchers often refer to them as hormones.
DeRosa’s work is supported by Growing Forward 2, a federal-provincial-territorial research plan; the federal AgriInnovation program; and the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council.
tspears@ottawacitizen.com
twitter.com/TomSpears1
查看原文...
Once they reach adolescence, male pigs start producing two chemicals that produce a foul smell when the meat is cooked. The smell is known as “boar taint,” and comes from the chemicals skatole and androstenone.
People compare the smell to manure, sweat and urine, and chemistry professor Maria DeRosa is looking for a simple, cheap way to avoid it.
“This boar taint is in male pigs. So either the farmers don’t send those off for us to eat, or they castrate them (as piglets) so that they won’t produce those hormones and we won’t get that effect,” she said.
“I guess already in Europe they are banning these castrations, and that’s going to be coming here to Canada too.”
One response is to detect animals with higher levels of the chemicals that cause boar taint and remove them from breeding stock. Another would be to test a carcass early in the production cycle, before it is packaged and sold.
But how? Humans can’t smell these chemicals in raw meat.
DeRosa listened to ideas the industry was kicking around. “Some of them were really out of this world, like training wasps to smell the compounds,” she said. She felt there was a better way.
She’s now working on test strips with chemicals that react visibly to traces of the two compounds. It’s like a home pregnancy test kit that turns colour when it detects certain hormones.
And the irony of a pregnancy-style test for male animals? “I love it! That’s exactly what it is!”
“That sort of technology wouldn’t be difficult to implement in a meat-processing plant or even on a farm,” she said. “You could send kits in the mail. They’re just strips of paper, spotted with these aptamers” (chemicals that react to the hormones).
“That makes better-tasting meat.”
Technically androstenone is a male hormone while skatole is hormone-like, but researchers often refer to them as hormones.
DeRosa’s work is supported by Growing Forward 2, a federal-provincial-territorial research plan; the federal AgriInnovation program; and the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council.
tspears@ottawacitizen.com
twitter.com/TomSpears1
查看原文...
