From the result of our previous differential-display PCR analysis in
the longissimus muscle (LM), the septin 7 (CDC10) gene showed higher
expression levels in two high-marbled Japanese Black (JB) steers than
in two low-marbled Holstein steers across all ages of the test period
(Sasaki et al., 2006a). The CDC10 gene is known to be involved in cellular
proliferation (Nagata, Asano, Nozawa, & Inagaki, 2004), and it has been
reported that a quantitative trait locus for marbling was mapped in a
half-sib family of JB cattle to a genomic region containing the CDC10
gene on bovine chromosome 4 (Takasuga et al., 2007). Thus, the
CDC10 was considered as a positional functional candidate gene for
marbling.