The aim of this study was perform genome association studies for meat quality and carcass traits and thereafter build gene network to improve the knowledge of genes, pathways and the physiological mechanisms that affect meat quality and carcass traits. In addition, the identification of transcriptional factors related to those genes was used to validate this network. We performed genome association studies for 12 traits (one trait at time) in a F₂ population (produced by crossing naturalized Brazilian breed Piau with commercial line) and we found 144 significant SNPs (p-value < 0.05). These SNPs were selected to build the Association Weight Matrix (AWM), which was used to investigate the genetic basis of these traits and generate gene network based on the co-association of pair-wise SNPs across phenotypes. Through this methodology, we found 45 genes that were used to build a gene network based on pairwise correlations between them. We identified 25 transcription factors (TF) strongly related (p-value < 0.001) with genes in the network. The top 3 TF (Sox5, Nkx2–5 and T) were chosen for construction of a network with their pathways and gene ontology. The genes present in the network generated from AWM and also present in TF network were involved mainly in metabolism of adipose tissue and skeletal muscle. These results suggest that genes and TF identified here are important in the control of meat quality and carcass traits. However, further efforts should be made to study in more detail the new gene-gene interactions here identified, as well as, the key transcription factors and pathways involved in these traits.