Author(s)

Youji Muramatsu¹, Hideki Tanomura², Takeshi Ohta³, Hiroyuki Kose⁴, Takahisa Yamada^2*

¹Department of Nutritional Sciences for Well-Being, Faculty of Health Sciences for Welfare, Kansai University of Welfare Sciences, Osaka, Japan.
²Laboratory of Animal Genetics, Graduate School of Science and Technology, Niigata University, Niigata, Japan.
³Central Pharmaceutical Research Institute, Japan Tobacco, Inc., Osaka, Japan.
⁴Department of Life Science, Division of Natural Sciences, International Christian University, Tokyo, Japan.

Marbling defined by the amount and distribution of intramuscular fat is regarded as an economically important trait of beef cattle in Japan. The pancreatic lipase gene (PNLIP) is located within the genomic region of a bovine marbling quantitative trait locus. The rat homologue of PNLIP has been previously shown to be regarded as a possible candidate for the gene responsible for intramuscular fat content. These findings suggested that PNLIP was a positional and functional candidate for the marbling gene. In this study, we detected a single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP), g.37288470A > G, at 1917 bp upstream of the PNLIP transcription initiation site between Holstein steers and somatic nuclear-derived cloned steers from a Japanese Black sire with a very high estimated breeding value for marbling by sequencing analysis. Further, we found statistically significant difference in the allelic distribution of the SNP between 17 Japanese Black unrelated sires with extremely high predicted breeding values for marbling and 17 sires with extremely low ones (P = 0.0332). Our findings suggest that g.37288470A > G SNP in the promoter region of PNLIP might be associated with marbling by altering its gene expression, and be useful for effective marker-assisted selection to increase the levels of marbling in Japanese Black beef cattle.

PNLIP, Japanese Black Breed, Marbling, Single Nucleotide Polymorphism

Muramatsu, Y. , Tanomura, H. , Ohta, T. , Kose, H. and Yamada, T. (2016) Allele Frequency Distribution in PNLIP Promoter SNP Is Different between High-Marbled and Low-Marbled Japanese Black Beef Cattle. Open Journal of Animal Sciences, 6, 137-141. doi: 10.4236/ojas.2016.62017.