Serum Metabolite Biomarkers for Predicting Residual Feed Intake (RFI) of Young Angus Bulls
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Residual feed intake (RFI) is a feed efficiency measure commonly used in the livestock industry to identify animals that efficiently/inefficiently convert feed into meat or body mass. Selection for low-residual feed intake (LRFI), or feed efficient animals, is gaining popularity among beef producers due to the fact that LRFI cattle eat less and produce less methane per unit weight gain. RFI is a difficult and time-consuming measure to perform, and therefore a simple blood test that could distinguish high-RFI (HRFI) from LRFI animals (early on) would potentially benefit beef farmers in terms of optimizing production or selecting which animals to cull or breed. Using three different metabolomics platforms (nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectrometry, liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry (LC-MS/MS), and inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry (ICP-MS)) we successfully identified serum biomarkers for RFI that could potentially be translated to an RFI blood test. One set of predictive RFI biomarkers included formate and leucine (best for NMR), and another set included C4 (butyrylcarnitine) and LysoPC(28:0) (best for LC-MS/MS). These serum biomarkers have high sensitivity and specificity (AUROC > 0.85), for distinguishing HRFI from LRFI animals. These results suggest that serum metabolites could be used to inexpensively predict and categorize bovine RFI values. Further validation using a larger, more diverse cohort of cattle is required to confirm these findings.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".