BLACKSBURG, Va. – Three Virginia Tech biochemistry majors Cat Hayes, Duke Nguyen, and Will Stone have a entirely new appreciation for turkey.
Associate professor Richard Helm gave his students the opportunity to dig into the experiment by analyzing large data sets and spending time in the lab with state-of-the-art instruments. Taking the HokieBird as inspiration, the students conducted a protein analysis of turkey, looking at leg, thigh, and breast meat. They were asked to investigate the difference between white and dark meat by analyzing the proteins that give turkey its color.
The students looked at the most essential proteins, exploring high-quality protein identifications. They also learned how to pinpoint contaminants in the turkey samples to see how clean the tissue was. In order to understand the numerical difference between breast, thigh, and leg tissue proteins, the students analyzed spreadsheets with thousands of fields — a daunting task. They then developed their own formulas, color coding, filters, and other methods to allow them to see differences and evaluate statistical significance.
“I was both scared and excited,” said Stone, a junior from Springfield, Virginia. “After staring at the data on my computer for at least an hour, I just jumped in the water to figure out how to sort it all."
The researchers discovered that enzymes involved in glycolysis, the metabolic pathway that converts glucose into energy, were similar in the turkey thigh and leg, and different in the breast. The concentrations of glycolysis proteins in breast were higher because this muscle is used for flight in birds, a process that relies heavily on glycolysis.
The thigh and leg meat contained relatively less glycolysis protein and more proteins associated with mitochondria because these tissues receive greater levels of oxygen, and these muscles are used more frequently when the turkey is standing or moving.
Although their focus was on proteins, the students also analyzed lipids in the three turkey tissues and found that thigh meat lipids oxidized faster than breast or leg meat. This, according to Helm, could drive further turkey research comparing frozen versus fresh, wild versus domestic, organic versus traditional, and so forth.