Reliability of Different Histological Methods for Estimation of Muscle Fiber Structure in Msm

Histochemical methods based on either well-established Toluidine Blue staining or contemporary immunohistochemical labeling based on myosin and laminin antibodies were applied on comminuted chicken meat to evaluate the potential of different histological methods to objectively detect muscle tissue and muscle tissue degradation. Also, Haematoxylin-Eosin staining was studied for the same purposes. Since the ultimate goal is to develop automated image analysis software, the prerequisites of image capturing were of interest as well. All investigated methods made the visualization of muscle tissue possible, but classification of samples of different degrees of muscle degradation into defined categories varied. Taking following aspects, such as image contrast and quality, into consideration, the immunohistochemical method with myosin and laminin antibodies, which in addition has an advantage of exploiting fully automated imaging equipment, provides objective images with good representativeness to determine the content of muscle tissue and evaluate the level of degradation in comminuted chicken meat samples.