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Objective: The current research aimed at investigating growth performances and meat yield characteristics of commercial cockerels supplemented with antibiotics and probiotics to the diet. Materials and methods: A total of 1,350 commercial cockerels (ISA Brown) were indiscriminately distributed to 3 treatment groups, each having three replications of 150-day-old chicks based on completely randomized design. The basal diet was treated as the control, while the experimental groups receiving Enrofloxacin 1 gm/kg and Protexin 1 gm/kg feed were considered as antibiotic and probiotic groups, respectively. Bodyweight, feed intake (FI), feed conversion ratio (FCR), and other relevant characteristics were recorded weekly until 49 days of trial. In the end, similar number (10) of birds from each replicate group were slaughtered to determine the carcass characteristics. Results: Significantly, better results were found in the overall growth performances of the cockerels in the probiotic-fed treatment group. Highly significant differences were also found in live bodyweight, weight gain, daily gain, FI, FCR, survivability, dressing percentage, abdominal fat, breast meat, drumstick, and thigh weight in the probiotic-fed treatment group compared to the others. Conclusion: The results of the present study indicate that the inclusion of dietary probiotics has a superior performance to antibiotics and may have the potentiality to be used as an alternative growth enhancer in the diet of cockerels.

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Individual selection is particularly indispensable in selection experiments for body weight in quail. Body weight is highly heritable trait. The study was conducted with the objective to assess the productive and reproductive performance and expected response to selection of second generation (G 2 ) of four quail varieties conserved at Bangladesh livestock Research Institute. At 5 th week of age, quails of first generation (G 1 ) were selected on the basis of breeding value according to their 5 th week body weight. A total of 1953-day-old chicks were hatched in two batches for producing second generation (G 2 ). Diet containing 24% crude protein and 3000 kcal ME/kg were provided to the birds. The data were analyzed in a CRD factorial arrangement by General Linear Model (GLM) Univariate Procedure in SPSS Computer Program. The highest fertility was observed in White (98.31%) variety and hatchability was in Japanese (97.75%) variety. Differences in chick weight at hatch between White and Brown, Brown and Japanese, Japanese and Black, Black and White were approximately 6.90%, 2.74%, 6.20% and 10.51% respectively. The effect of variety and batch on 5 th week body weight was significant (p<0.001) but interaction effect of variety and batch was not significant (p>0.05). Black quail had significantly (χ 2 = 25.00; p<0.01) higher (17.62%) chick mortality than that of other three varieties. As a result of selection, body weight at 5 th weeks of age was expected to improve by 4.34g vs. 6.51g; 1.21g vs. 4.33g, 1.68g vs. 3.77g and 1.02g vs. 2.40g respectively for Japanese, White, Brown and Black males and females quail genotypes. It is therefore can be concluded that the White variety is superior in terms of higher body weight and higher fertility and medium chick mortality among the four quail varieties. In each generation, slight response was obtained for selection.

Lactobacillus acidophilus bacteria are widely used as probiotic and to produce various healthy fermented food products. The PNW3 strain of the bacteria has numerous proteins in its genome and some are considered as hypothetical proteins. The aim of the present study was to predict the structures and biological functions of the hypothetical protein (accession number: TDB29877.1) from L. acidophilus through an in-silico approach applying various bioinformatics tools. The sequence similarity was searched on the available biological databases using BLASTp program to find out the homologues proteins. Besides, determination of various properties like physicochemical characteristics, subcellular localization, phylogenetic analysis, functional annotation, protein-protein interaction, determination of secondary and tertiary structures, active site detection and further quality assessment analysis were done using appropriate computational methods of bioinformatics. In-silico analysis revealed that the hypothetical protein has contained TerB-N and TerB-C domains with the presence of YjbR-like superfamily. The Protein-protein interaction network analysis revealed that the protein highly interacted with various known and unknown proteins responsible for iron ion binding, DNA and RNA metabolisms and numerous repair mechanisms that maintain cellular integrity. It was also found that the protein has predominantly alpha-helices in its secondary structure and the three dimensional model has been found to be novel as it possessed expected quality while gone through various quality assessment tools. Thus, the present result indicated that the selected hypothetical protein which is cytoplasmic in nature with Belta-grasp fold, plays important role in responding during stress condition or phage defense mechanism.