Use of a bovine genome chip to identify new biological pathways for beef quality in cattle.

The accumulation of muscle is largely influenced by the genetic background of cattle. Muscle tissue was collected from the longissimus muscle of Lilu beef cattle at 12, 18, 24 and 30 months old. Using meat quality analysis, we found that the Lilu beef cattle have good production and slaughter performance, the performance meets the criterion of beef cattle. Microarray analysis was able to identify a total of 4,219 genes that are differentially expressed (P ≤ 0.01) between the two groups of cattle (12 vs 18; 18 vs 24; 24 vs 30). Bioinformatics analysis results suggested that most of the differentially expressed genes are involved in the metabolic pathways and neuroactive ligand-receptor interaction pathways. In the future study that aims to look for genes relating to growth and meat quality, we will focus on the genes that have been shown to have a significant variation between groups and are involved in the two pathways.