Ming Huang

Accurate portioning of bone-in pork ribs remains challenging because of their curved geometry, uneven meat thickness, and irregular bone–meat distribution. To address this issue, we developed a semi-automatic two-stage pork rib cutting system based on 3D line laser scanning. In the first stage, inter-rib seams were identified from the point cloud of a whole rib rack to determine cutting positions. The separated rib strips were then manually reloaded, aligned, and rescanned. In the second stage, skeleton curves were extracted and adaptive equal-arc-length cutting positions were generated within a preset range of 40–50 mm. The segmentation method was evaluated on 20 independent pork rib racks and achieved mean precision, recall, F1-score, and overall accuracy values of 0.936, 0.918, 0.927, and 0.931, respectively. In the cutting experiment, three racks containing 32 rib strips produced 163 final portions. The pooled rib-seam cutting success, length qualification, bone fracture, and overall cutting success rates were 89.66%, 89.57%, 5.52%, and 87.73%, respectively. The operating cycle time was approximately 120 s per rack, corresponding to a nominal throughput of 30 racks h⁻¹. These results indicate that the system can identify rib seams and produce uniform portions, providing a feasible approach for semi-automatic processing of bone-in pork ribs.

This study aimed to clarify effects of heat sterilization temperatures on the release of peptides and nutritional value of braised chicken after digestion. Braised chicken was sterilized at 121 ℃ (HS), 100 ℃ (MS), and 80 ℃ (LS) for 30 min before in vitro digestion. The release of peptides was assessed by UPLC-LTQ-Orbitrap-MS, while functional differences were analyzed by network pharmacology combined with molecular dynamics simulations. A total of 918 peptides were identified and 53 peptides were significantly reduced in LS, MS, and HS groups compared with the control group. The 373 potential targets of these peptides were uncovered, 106 of which were highly associated with arteriosclerosis. In protein-protein-interaction network, SRC, IL1B, MMP9, CD4 and CASP3 were key targets. GO and KEGG enrichment analysis documented that function involved in modulation were G protein-coupled peptide receptor activity, external side of plasma membrane, extracellular matrix disassembly, and neuroactive ligand-receptor interaction. Molecular docking and molecular dynamics simulations suggested that the interaction between peptides and associated targets depended upon hydrogen bonds and hydrophobic interactions. ALESPERPFLAILGGAK, RTKYETDAIQ, VNDAFGTAH, DAEDIVNTPKPDER and EDFGGHHPDPN exhibited the strongest binding ability with SRC, IL1B, MMP9, CD4 and CASP3, respectively. These results suggest that elevated sterilization temperatures result in decreased peptide release, which may diminish the nutritional value of braised chicken, particularly in relation to arteriosclerosis. These findings suggested insights for optimizing sterilization processes to preserve bioactive peptides in meat products.