Iron Content Affects Lipogenic Gene Expression in the Muscle of Nelore Beef Cattle.

Iron (Fe) is an essential mineral for metabolism and plays a central role in a range of biochemical processes. Therefore, this study aimed to identify differentially expressed (DE) genes and metabolic pathways in Longissimus dorsi (LD) muscle from cattle with divergent iron content, as well as to investigate the likely role of these DE genes in biological processes underlying beef quality parameters. Samples for RNA extraction for sequencing and iron, copper, manganese, and zinc determination were collected from LD muscles at slaughter. Eight Nelore steers, with extreme genomic estimated breeding values for iron content (Fe-GEBV), were selected from a reference population of 373 animals. From the 49 annotated DE genes (FDR