Lowered Dietary Calcium and Its Effects on the Production Performance, Meat Quality and Adipogenic Marker Gene Expression of Korean Hanwoo Beef Cattle

Emil Joseph Sanvictores Vergara, Yeul Chang Baek, Doo Hyun Kim and Seong Gu Hwang

 

Full Length Research Paper I Published August,2016

 

Journal of Agricultural Science and Food Technology  Vol. 2 (7), pp.114-118

 

 

ABSTRACT

 

Marbling is one of the most important characteristics in the production of high quality beef. In practice, nutritional manipulations are frequently performed in order to achieve better marbled and thus higher quality beef. The present study was designed in order to determine the effect of lowered dietary calcium on the meat quality of Korean Hanwoo beef cattle. Dietary calcium was reduced through the decrease of limestone content in the feed formulation. Sixty animals were divided into 3 groups "[20 animals each]", control (1.32% limestone), treatment 1 (1.02% limestone) and treatment 2 (0.72% limestone). After six months of feeding trial, the animals were slaughtered and the carcass characteristics and production performance were obtained.  In addition, RNA samples were isolated from muscle samples collected from the cervical area and the expression of adipogenic marker genes (PPARγ, CEBP/α, aP2 and SREBPc) were measured through reverse transcriptase polymerase chain reaction. Results have shown that lowering the dietary calcium level causes no improvements or changes in the production performance, carcass quality, serum biochemical parameters, and mRNA expression of adipogenic marker genes. Also, no significant changes were seen in the calcium content of the serum suggesting a tight regulation for the mineral by the calcium homeostasis system of the animal. In conclusion, lowered dietary calcium at the level used in this study does not result in increased carcass characteristics in Hanwoo beef cattle.

Key Words: Calcium, Marbling, Adipogenic genes, Micronutrient manipulation and Meat quality.
 

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