Improving the predication efficiency of porcine production performance at early stage will contribute to reducing the breeding and production costs. The intestinal microbiota had received plenty of attention in recent years due to their influence on host health and performance. The purpose of this study was to investigate the relationship between the fecal microbiota at early growth period and porcine feed efficiency (FE) under a commercial feeding environment. Ninety-one pigs were reordered according to the residual feed intake (RFI) values between day 90 on test and day 160 off test, 9 lowest RFI pigs and 9 highest RFI pigs were selected as the LRFI group and the HRFI group, respectively. Fecal samples from pigs in the early grower phase (day 80) were performed for microbial diversity, composition, and predicted functionality by using 16S rRNA sequencing. The results showed that no significant differences in microbial alpha diversity were observed between two RFI groups, whereas, some RFI-associated compositional differences were revealed. In particular, the microbiota of the LRFI group (more feed-efficient) had significantly higher levels of some members of Clostridiales and Bacteroidales (e.g., g_1_68 and g_norank_f_p_2534_18B5), which may promoted FE through protecting gut barrier function, compared with those of the HRFI pigs. Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes (KEGG) pathways analysis found that the LRFI pigs were likely have microbiota with higher levels of amino acid metabolism. Moreover, redundancy analysis (RDA) showed that litter size, parity, and date of birth had significant effects on the bacterial community structure. These results improved our knowledge of the porcine early-life fecal microbiota and its potential link underlying RFI, which would be useful for future development of microbial biomarkers for predicting and improving porcine FE as well as investigation of targets for dietary strategies.
The influence of different treatments of quartz substrate on morphology and adhesion of carbon coatings was studied. The surfaces of quartz substrates were abraded by using fine and coarse abrasive papers respectively to develop rough surface features. Adherent carbon coatings with different surface roughness were obtained. In order to grow adherent carbon coatings with very smooth surfaces, a silicon intermediate layer was grown by means of electron beam evaporation. Carbon coatings deposited on the intermediate layers were adherent to the quartz substrates.
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