Abstract: The metabonomes of fresh duck, vinasse-cured duck and vinasse were found to be dominated by 34 metabolites, including amino acids, sugars, organic acids, alkaloids, alcohols, nucleic acid and their derivatives. These compounds were not only the important metabolites during processing, but also were the main low molecular mass taste compounds in vinasse-cured duck. Our results showed that amino acids, alcohols, alkaloids and sugars decreased during boiling and salting, and then increased during vinasse-curing. Formate and hypoxanthine increased throughout all processing steps while lactate, creatine, 5’-IMP and inosine decreased. The most affluent metabolites in vinasse-cured duck were lactate (4.74 and 3.30 mg/g in dry and wet vinasse-cured duck), aspartate (2.06 and 3.15 mg/g in dry and wet vinasse-cured duck), creatin (2.78 and 1.30 mg/g in dry and wet vinasse-cured duck) and glucose (2.12 and 3.51 mg/g in dry and wet vinasse-cured duck). 1H nuclear magnetic resonance (1H NMR) spectroscopy is suitable to analyze the non-volatile compounds during the processing of vinasse-cured duck. The effects of wet vinasse-curing on the contents of metabolites were more significant than those of dry vinasse-curing.

Key words: vinasse-cured duck, processing, 1H NMR, taste compounds, metabonomics