Optimizing Fish Fillet Quality: The Impacts of Dietary Interventions and Oxidation

Dear Colleagues,

The quality of fish feed plays a crucial role in determining the quality of fish fillets. A balanced and nutritious diet not only promotes healthy growth but also enhances the texture, flavor, and nutritional value of the fillet. Fish fed with high-quality feed tend to have firmer flesh, richer flavor, and higher levels of desirable nutrients such as omega-3 fatty acids. Thus, selecting the right feed with optimal nutritional composition is essential for producing high-quality fish fillets.

Fish fillets deteriorate more rapidly than other types of meat, due to the presence of double-bonded carbon chains, making proper storage imperative to preserve their freshness. Effective storage methods, such as refrigeration or freezing, are crucial to slow down spoilage and maintain the quality and safety of fish fillets.

The high contents of omega-3 fatty acids and heme groups in fish fillets make them prone to oxidation. Protein oxidation is caused directly by reactive oxygen species (ROS) or indirectly through reactions with the products of lipid oxidation. Deterioration in the quality of fish fillets encompasses various interactions between different products of lipid and protein oxidation. These interactions influence several quality markers such as color, flavor, protein aggregation, and texture.

Food processing typically involves transforming perishable raw materials into valuable final products. The fishing industry is striving to improve information on the catch date of their products to ensure they meet freshness standards. Factors affecting freshness can be broadly categorized into extrinsic and intrinsic. Extrinsic factors include pre-slaughter care, storage conditions, animal breeds, feeding habits, packaging, and post-mortem duration. Intrinsic factors include energy metabolism, muscle pH, proteolysis, oxidation, and protein modification.

Food protein oxidation leads to reduced nutritional value, impaired functionality, and, often, lower product quality. This process is typically linked with other oxidative reactions in foods, such as lipid oxidation and oxygen-facilitated enzymatic reactions. Understanding how food processing methods alter the physical and sensory properties of foods is necessary, as these methods can result in both beneficial and undesirable alterations in nutritional content, texture, color, flavor, and other similar characteristics. Effective food processing and equipment design necessitate a thorough understanding of the fundamental physicochemical properties of food, which can be unpredictable due to their structural complexity.

In this Special Issue, we invite submissions exploring the impact of fish processing, fish welfare, mitochondrial alterations, and dietary interventions on the quality characteristics of fish fillets, with a particular focus on their physicochemical properties.

Dr. Nima Hematyar
Dr. Samad Rahimnejad
Dr. Francisco A. Guardiola
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

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Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Fishes is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2600 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• dietary interventions
• lipid oxidation
• protein modification
• fish welfare
• fish fillet quality