Searching for Phenotypic Causal Links among Meat Quality Traits in Japanese Black Cattle

Abstract Text: Meat quality is the important traits determining carcass price in Japanese beef market. The objective of this research was to infer phenotypic causal networks involving beef marbling score, beef color score, firmness (FIR) and texture (TEX) of beef, beef fat color score (BFS), and the ratio of saturated fatty acids to mono unsaturated fatty acids from Japanese Black cattle. An adaptation of the Inductive Causation (IC) algorithm was implemented to search for causal links among these traits, which was applied to their joint distribution conditionally on genetic effects. The undirected edges among the traits except for BFS were detected by the IC algorithm with 95% highest posterior density (HPD) intervals. Applying smaller HPD intervals resulted in recovering more edges and the undirected edges were changed into directed ones except between FIR and TEX. The analysis uncovered some interesting functional relationships between these traits.

Keywords:

Meat quality

Inductive causation

Japanese Black