Relationships between hepatic mitochondrial function and residual feed intake in growing beef calves

摘要

Residual feed intake (RFI) is a feed efficiency trait that quantifies inter-animal variance in dry matter intake (DMI) that is unexplained by variation related to body weight (BW) and growth rate-efficient animals are those that consume less DMI thanexpected for a given BW and growth rate. Herd et al. (2004) estimated that approximately one-third of the biological variation in RFI of growing calves could be explained by inter-animal differences in digestion, heat increment, composition of growth and activity, and posited that the remaining two-thirds was linked to inter-animal variation in energy expenditure. The objective of this study was to determine if calves with divergent RFI phenotypes differ in hepatic mitochondrial function.