Expressão de características produtivas e reprodutivas de progênies gestadas em diferentes níveis nutricionais

Abstract

Due to the great demand in the breeding of animals for production and food, a search for a higher performance efficiency that also expressed organoleptic characteristics linked to meat began. This need triggered a rigorous selection process, improving the performance and growth of the animals. Taking into account the concept developed by Barker (1993), children of pregnant mothers during the Dutch famine in World War II were slender people, with developmental and health problems. With these observations in humans came the concept of fetal programming. The postnatal stages are well elucidated and common knowledge, but in recent years research has been highlighted with a focus on the gestational period of bovine females, seeking to understand the epigenetic effects during fetal development, and the results in postnatal life. These researches are mainly based on the nutritional plan to which the pregnant female is submitted, where maternal nutritional restriction can cause growth limitation, pointed out as one of the main problems in the zootechnical performance of the offspring. Some time ago it was thought that the restriction was exclusively protein, but several studies have demonstrated the importance of energy and mineral supplementation, playing fundamental factors for perfect fetal programming. Therefore, the understanding of the nutritional requirements of pregnant cows is of great importance, so that the negative impacts of feed restriction are mitigated. Therefore, the objective of this study is to survey studies on fetal programming of beef cattle and its impact on productivity throughout the life of gestated offspring at different nutritional levels.