Postmortem Degradation of Glycogen and Starch in Fish Muscle

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Abstract
Degradation of glycogen and starch in excised fish muscle blocks at 0–5 C postmortem was investigated by use of radioactive substrates. Separation of the various metabolites in the stored muscles was accomplished by perchloric acid extraction, gel filtration, treatment with anion and cation exchange resins followed by appropriate elution methods, and paper chromatography. The results showed that glycogen is degraded by both hydrolytic (anxiolytic) and phosphorolytic (Embden–Myerhof) pathways, and that starch is similarly degraded but more slowly. The degradative pattern was not significantly altered by brief blending of the muscle. Though lactate and glucose usually predominated, dextrins (or nondegraded substrate), maltose, glucose 6-phosphate, hexose diphosphate, ribose 5-phosphate, and ribose were also recovered. Though results obtained with muscle from widely different fish species were in general rather similar there were obvious quantitative differences which could possibly be attributed to a number of factors such as species differences, nutritional status, holding temperature, and state of maturation. The fact that labelled dextrins, glucose, and ribose were formed in muscle injected with radioactive lactate, suggested that all the reversible glycolytic enzymes and glycogen synthetase are functional in fish muscle blocks.

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