Life Sciences Commons^™

Pituitary Genomic Expression Profiles Of Steers Are Altered By Grazing Of High Vs. Low Endophyte-Infected Tall Fescue Forages, Qing Li, Raquel Hegge, Phillip J. Bridges, James C. Matthews

Animal and Food Sciences Faculty Publications

Consumption of ergot alkaloid-containing tall fescue grass impairs several metabolic, vascular, growth, and reproductive processes in cattle, collectively producing a clinical condition known as “fescue toxicosis.” Despite the apparent association between pituitary function and these physiological parameters, including depressed serum prolactin; no reports describe the effect of fescue toxicosis on pituitary genomic expression profiles. To identify candidate regulatory mechanisms, we compared the global and selected targeted mRNA expression patterns of pituitaries collected from beef steers that had been randomly assigned to undergo summer-long grazing (89 to 105 d) of a high-toxic endophyte-infected tall fescue pasture (HE; 0.746 μg/g ergot alkaloids; …