With recent increases in household

With recent increases in household income, meat consumption is increasing rapidly and consumers' preferences for meats are changing to higher-quality products. Thus, there exists a growing interest in improving the meat quality of chickens. As poultry meat is a low-fat, low-cholesterol, low-calorie, and high-protein food, consumers have begun to prefer chicken to red meat, resulting in a dramatic increase in the quantity of available chicken meat, due to the development of new processed products (Ahn et al., 1997). According to the report of the Korean Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry, per capita consumption of poultry meats has increased by approximately 3 kg over the past few decades, from 5.6 kg in
1998 to 8.6 kg in 2007 (Chae et al., 2002). Despite these recent increases in the preference for and
consumption of chicken meat, traditional Korean native chickens (Gallus gallus domesticus)have not been produced in sufficient numbers, because large amounts of much cheaper foreign broilers have been imported under
the FTA system.