How Muscle Structure and Composition Influence Meat and Flesh Quality

Figure 1

General organization of the muscle [9]. Skeletal muscle predominantly consists of muscle fibers and connective tissue. The latter is distributed on three levels of scale in the muscle: the endomysium, which surrounds each muscle fiber, the perimysium, which compartmentalizes muscle in fiber bundles, and finally the epimysium, which is the external envelope of muscle. Within the fibers, the myofibrils occupy nearly the entire intracellular volume. The contractile unit of the muscle fiber is the sarcomere.