Research Progress on Wooden Breast and White Striping Myopathies in Broilers

Recently, wooden breast (WB) and white striping (WS), the newly reported myopathies attracted wide attention of global poultry industry for their increasing incidences and negative effects on meat quality and broiler performance.WS is characterized by the occurrence of white fat striations parallel to muscle fibers, while WB is mainly featured with obvious hardening of breast meat fillets. These two myopathies share similar histological lesions and often appear together. They can adversely affect breast fillet’s appearance, nutrition value, ability for further processes and consumption intention, which result in huge economic loss to the industry. In recent years,most of the studies on WS and WB were reported by international research groups, few by Chinese research teams.In this review,we summarized the research progress of WS and WB from the aspect of pathological features,impacts on meat quality and nutrition value, the underlying causes and possible detailed mechanism in order to provide reference and theoretical basis for future studies.