Abstract
Beef quality is a complex phenotype that can be evaluated only after animal slaughtering. Previous research has investigated the potential of genetic markers or muscle-derived proteins to assess beef tenderness. Thus, the use of low-invasive biomarkers in living animals is an issue for the beef sector. We hypothesized that publicly available data may help us discovering candidate plasma biomarkers. Thanks to a review of the literature, we built a corpus of articles on beef tenderness. Following data collection, aggregation, and computational reconstruction of the muscle secretome, the putative plasma proteins were searched by comparison with a bovine plasma proteome atlas and submitted to mining of biological information. Of the 44 publications included in the study, 469 unique gene names were extracted for aggregation. Seventy-one proteins putatively released in the plasma were revealed. Among them 13 proteins were predicted to be secreted in plasma, 44 proteins as hypothetically secreted in plasma, and 14 additional candidate proteins were detected thanks to network analysis. Among these 71 proteins, 24 were included in tenderness quantitative trait loci. The in-silico workflow enabled the discovery of candidate plasma biomarkers for beef tenderness from reconstruction of the secretome, to be examined in the cattle plasma proteome.
Highlights
Animal products are the main source of protein and essential nutrients in human nutrition
Transcriptional muscle profiling enabled the detection of gene transcripts involved in fat, energy metabolism and heat shock response (e.g., DNAJA1, HSPB1 and CRYAB), as candidate biomarkers for meat tenderness [17,18], which were included in a dedicated micro-array [18]
The computational data aggregation from these 44 publications gave an overview of 1299 ID gene name (GN) related to meat tenderness whatever the muscle, breed, animal type, sex, age at slaughter, geographic area, and methodologies used for tenderness evaluation
Summary
Animal products are the main source of protein and essential nutrients in human nutrition. The objective is to increase meat production to meet human nutritional needs, in industrialised countries the major expectations concern meat quality [1] A challenge for the beef sector in those countries is to predict and manage the meat quality attributes in order to ensure their low variability. The identification of biomarkers for meat quality measurable in living animals is a good opportunity to develop monitoring, decision-making and management tools for beef quality prior to slaughter. Transcriptional muscle profiling enabled the detection of gene transcripts involved in fat, energy metabolism and heat shock response (e.g., DNAJA1, HSPB1 and CRYAB), as candidate biomarkers for meat tenderness [17,18], which were included in a dedicated micro-array [18]. Inverse relationships between some biomarkers and beef tenderness were reported as a function of muscle properties [23]
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