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.