ENDURING tough lamb chops sizzled on the Australia Day barbecue may be a thing of the past following a genetic discovery.
Geneticists and biochemists working with the Sheep Co-operative Research Centre have successfully identified the pattern of genes responsible for the taste, flavour and tenderness of mutton, The Australian reports.
A selection and breeding program involving stud rams from several breeds is now under way to spread the best "edibility" and "consumer satisfaction" genes for lamb through the Australian flock as quickly as possible.
Sheep CRC meat program leader and Murdoch University biochemistry professor Dave Pethick says the commonly held view that lamb is always tender and juicy because of its young age is wrong.
Instead, scientific tests and consumer taste panels during the past two years have found a wide variation in quality, which can be directly linked to the genetic make-up of each lamb's parents irrespective of breed.
"We all want to please consumers with a guarantee that the lamb they are buying is always tender, juicy and tasty, but up until now we haven't been able to do that," Professor Pethick said.
"This program is about speeding up the sort of selection producers now do on their farms to get the biggest, fastest-growing and leanest lambs, but making sure they are also not compromising on the meat's tenderness and taste."
Following the discovery that taste and tenderness are genetically linked, Professor Pethick's team has been able to trace back the best-tasting lamb chops to a common set or pattern of genes present in individual sires across an Australia-wide test flock of more than 400 rams.
While tenderness traits were linked to just a few specific genes, several hundred or thousands of genes present in a common pattern in all the top-ranked rams combined to always result in tasty, juicy and flavoursome meat.
The 35 rams found to combine the ability to produce progeny that gave the best-tasting meat, as well as being fast-growing and lean, have been identified in the breakthrough selection program as "five-star" premier sires.
Sires that produced lambs that were great-tasting, but a notch below the best were ranked as four-star. Anything below a three-star score was rated an unsatisfactory or unacceptable sheepmeat sire.
An interesting finding was that there was no difference in the ability of meat sheep sire breeds such as Suffolk, Poll Dorset or Texel to produce the best-tasting lamb, but great genetic variation between individual sheep within all breeds.
West Australian prime lamb producer Dawson Bradford couldn't be more delighted with the latest genetic development.
More than a dozen of the stud rams from his 50-year-old Hillcroft Farms Poll Dorset sheep stud were identified in the study as being five-star sires.
After years of objectively measuring and selecting rams for traits such as size and muscling, Mr Bradford said he had run out of options in producing even better lamb meat.
"What we know now is that we can't select for the best-eating quality meat by physically looking at a sheep, so we always ran the risk of selecting for other characteristics to the detriment of taste and tenderness," Mr Bradford said yesterday from his Narrogin farm.
"That's why this is such a breakthrough; the only way we can almost guarantee that the lamb consumers eat will be great every time is by identifying these exceptional sire animals through this DNA identification work that the CRC is now doing."
Professor Pethick predicts the day is not far away when large meat retailers will insist on only buying lamb from producers who have used four- or five-star rams to breed their lamb flocks.
Read more on The Australian.
