4 | DISCUSSION
The present work is a pioneering study of how the deposition of PUFAs in lamb muscle can be explained by diet items in desert grassland habitats. The present study introduces a novel and in-depth interpretation of the field diet consumed by grazing sheep that benefits from the power and robustness of fecal metabarcoding. Our findings qualitatively confirm the hypothesis that certain specific herbage taxa, not always the visible dominant species, are one of the determinants of the flavor formation in meat products of sheep.