Cinzia Marchitelli

Council for Agricultural Research and Agricultural Economy Analysis | CREA · Research Centre for Animal Production and Aquaculture (CREA-ZA)

The serine protease inhibitor, clade A, member 1 (SERPINA1) is the gene for a protein called alpha-1-antitrypsin (AAT), which is a member of the serine protease inhibitor (serpin) superfamily of proteins. By conformational change, serpins control several chemical reactions inhibiting the activity of proteases. AAT is the most abundant endogenous se...

Consumers demand healthy and palatable meat, both factors being affected by fat composition. However, red meat has relatively high concentration of saturated fatty acids and low concentration of the beneficial polyunsaturated fatty acids. To select animals prone to produce particular fat types, it is necessary to identify the genes influencing musc...

In this work, the genetic variation of milk FA was investigated in three different bovine breeds, the Jersey, the Piedmontese and the Valdostana, and at different lactation stages. All animals were genotyped for 21 Single Nucleotide Polymorphisms located within nine candidate genes involved in lipid synthesis: diacylglycerol acyltransferase 1 and 2...

Background Copy number variations (CNVs) represent a significant source of genomic structural variation. Their length ranges from approximately one hundred to millions of base pair. Genome-wide screenings have clarified that CNVs are a ubiquitous phenomenon affecting essentially the whole genome. Although Bos taurus is one of the most important dom...

The longhorned Maremmana breed is a descendent of the Bos taurus macroceros, that spread from the Eurasian steppes throughout Europe and that, in taly, can be traced as far back as the Etruscan era. This cattle (the Bos Silvestris described by Pliny in his Naturalis historia) was later crossed with the Podalica cattle developed from Bos primigenius...

The Lipizza stud-farm was established by Charles IIof Austria in 1580 in arder to produce horses of Spanish breed to be used at the court in Graz. After the Empire was re-uniteci in 1619, Lipizza stud-farm was directly taken care of by theImperia! family and developed for nearly two centuries exclusively to produce horses for the court in Vienna ....

E-Mails: p.a.koolmees@uu.nl (P.A.K.); l.t.g.theunissen@uu.nl (B.T.) Abstract: Classification of cattle breeds contributes to our understanding of the history of cattle and is essential for an effective conservation of genetic diversity. Here we review the various classifications over the last two centuries and compare the most recent classification...

The renin-angiotensin-aldosterone system is a target for blood pressure control. Angiotensin-I converting enzyme (ACE) plays a central role in the regulation of blood pressure. Milk proteins, both caseins and whey proteins, are a rich source of ACE inhibitor peptides. The aim of the research was investigated the effects of cow, buffalo and donkey c...

The aim of the present study was to evaluate the genetic variation of milk fat CLA, together with the variation of CLA precursors, including the individual PUFA that are potentially involved in the metabolic pathway of CLA. The allelic substitution effect, upon these FA, was estimated for a number of polymorphisms, that are located within 9 candida...

Stearoyl-CoA desaturase (SCD) plays a key metabolic role by changing the saturated FA content of ruminant milk and meat. In this study we characterized for the first time the stearoyl-CoA desaturase (SCD) gene in river buffalo (Bubalus bubalis) and investigated its genetic variability. On a total of 78 buffaloes, 15 SNPs were detected and 6 of them...

The aim of the present study was to investigate the genetic control of the fatty acid (FA) composition in milk from 3 breeds of sheep: Altamurana, Gentile di Puglia, and Sarda. Single nucleotide polymorphisms within genes, encoding enzymes putatively involved in the synthesis and metabolism of milk fat, were selected for analysis, and the allele su...

The introduction of livestock species in Europe has been followed by various genetic events, which created a complex spatial pattern of genetic differentiation. Spatial principal component (sPCA) analysis and spatial metric multidimensional scaling (sMDS) incorporate geography in multivariate analysis. This method was applied to three microsatellit...

Many of the qualitative differences noticed in the meats of various calf species depend from environmental characteristics (different reproduction systems, butchering age, etc.). Undoubtedly, there are some genetic factors that influence said quality, such as the composition of fat acids (poly-saturated and saturated), fat distribution, muscle fibr...

Twinning in cattle ranges from about 1% for beef breeds to about 4% for dairy breeds. The transforming growth factor signaling pathway within the ovary is critical for the regulation of ovarian function, ovulation rate, and fertility. In different species (sheep, human, and mouse) mutation in three genes GDF9 (Growth Differentiation Factor 9), BMP1...

A large number of putative single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) have been identified from the bovine genome-sequencing project. However, few of these have been validated and many will turn out to be sequencing artefacts or have low minor allele frequencies. In addition, there is little information available on SNPs within coding regions, which ar...

One hundred seven cattles of four breeds (Holstein–Friesian, Jersey, Valdostana and Piedmontese) were genotyped at the DGAT1 K232A and the SCD1 A293V variants, as well as at 7 SNPs of the GHR gene, that were used to construct 14 GHR haplotypes. Allele frequency at most SNPs, and GHR haplotype frequencies highly differed between breeds. The effect o...

With the aim to assess if some molecular markers can help to select animals for meat characteristics, we studied 84 individuals equally representing the Marchigiana, Maremmana, and Holstein Friesian cattle breeds genotyped at 288 SNPs located within candidate genes. Several SNPs were found associated with meat quality parameters but with P which wa...

Muscular hypertrophy is a recessive trait present in some European beef breeds. It shows a high frequency in Belgian Blue, Maine Anjou, Piedmontese breeds while in some others the frequency is low and hypertrophic individuals are rare. A deletion at the myostatin locus has been found responsible for the hypertrophic phenotype in Belgian Blue indepe...

Toll-like receptors (TLR) have an important role in the defence against a variety of infectious diseases. TLR recognize various microbial components and are important in the innate immune response to pathogens and in crosstalk between innate immunity and adaptive immunity. Polymorphisms in TLRs influence their abilities of recognition of pathogen-d...

The concept of breed is rather questionable and it’s used more as a tool for “labelling” production systems than as a biological category. Here, production system is intended as a whole set of animal units, techniques, breeding schemes, marketing, etc. However, man has demonstrated to be very quick in capturing and disseminating good characteristic...

Single nucleotide polymorphism (SNPs) have the potential to become the genetic marker of choice in studies on the ecology and the conservation of natural populations because of their high frequency across the genome. Being biallelic markers, SNPs are intrinsically less variable than microsatellites, so individual locus information content is low. H...

Milk products are important dietary sources of nutrients, providing energy, high quality proteins, and a variety of vitamins and minerals. Recent researches have focused on altering fat and protein contents of milk, in order to improve its nutrient content to more suitably reflect current dietary recommendations and trends. We characterized single...

The Neolithic introduction of domestic cattle into Europe was followed by differential adaptation, selection, migration and genetic isolation, leading ultimately to the emergence of specialized breeds. We have studied the differentiation of European cattle by amplified fragment length polymorphism (AFLP) fingerprinting. Combining AFLP data sets fro...

Matrix of common markers of the BovGen RH map with the MARC 2004 linkage map. Chromosomes on the BovGen RH map (vertical) and the MARC 2004 linkage map (horizontal) are indicated in bold. Numbers indicate the number of common markers between the BovGen RH map and the MARC 2004 linkage map. Numbers in the diagonals are the number of markers assigned...

Matrix of common markers of the BovGen RH map with the Btau_2.0 sequence. Chromosomes on the BovGen RH map (vertical) and Btau_2.0 sequence assembly (horizontal) are indicated in bold. Numbers indicate the number of common markers between the BovGen RH map and the Btau_2.0 sequence assembly. Numbers in the diagonals are the number of markers assign...

BovGen RH vectors. The first column indicates the marker name, the second column indicates the assigned chromosome and the third column gives RH vectors used for map construction. The vectors give screening results for each the used 94 cell lines for the Roslin RH panel. "0" indicates that the fragment is not present in the cell line, "1" indicates...

Matrix of common markers of the BovGen RH map with the ILTX 2005 map. Chromosomes on the BovGen RH map (vertical) and the ILTX 2005 map (horizontal) are indicated in bold. Numbers indicate the number of common markers between the BovGen RH map and the ILTX 2005 map. Numbers in the diagonals are the number of markers assigned to the same chromosomes...

Two methods have been developed for the assessment of conservation priorities on the basis of molecular markers. According to the Weitzman approach, contributions to genetic diversity are derived from genetic distances between populations. Alternatively, diversity within and across populations is optimized by minimizing marker-estimated kinships. W...

Several approaches can be used to determine the order of loci on chromosomes and hence develop maps of the genome. However, all mapping approaches are prone to errors either arising from technical deficiencies or lack of statistical support to distinguish between alternative orders of loci. The accuracy of the genome maps could be improved, in prin...

Double muscling is a partially recessive trait present in some beef breeds. It shows a high frequency in some breeds, while in others the frequency is low, and double-muscled individuals are rare. The double muscling is caused by an allelic series of mutations that cause a loss of function of the myostatin gene ( GDF8). We describe here a new mutat...

Myostatin (GDF8) acts as a negative regulator of muscle growth. Mutations in the gene are responsible for the double muscling phenotype in several European cattle breeds. Here we describe the sequence of the upstream 5' region of the myostatin gene. The sequence analysis was carried out on three animals of nine European cattle breeds, with the aim...

Growth differentiation factor 8 (GDF8) or myostatin is a member of the transforming growth factor β (TGF-β) superfamily, which includes proteins that mediate key events in cell growth and development through signal transduction. In the absence of myostatin, the skeletal musculature of mice is two to three times greater in mass than that of wild-typ...

Low-molecular-weight glutenin subunits (LMW-GSs) are wheat endosperm proteins mostly en-coded by genes located at the Glu-3 loci. These proteins are of particular interest in durum wheat because a co-rrelation between LMW-GSs encoded by genes at the Glu-B3 locus and the pasta-making quality of durum wheat semolina has been shown. We isolated and ch...