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Intestinal dysfunction of farm animals, such as intestinal inflammation and altered gut microbiota, is the critical problem affecting animal welfare, performance and farm profitability. China has prohibited the use of antibiotics to improve feed efficiency and growth performance for farm animals, including poultry, in 2020. With the advantages of maintaining gut homeostasis, enhancing digestion, and absorption and modulating gut microbiota, organic acids are regarded as promising antibiotic alternatives. Butyric and citric acids as presentative organic acids positively impact growth performance, welfare, and intestinal health of livestock mainly by reducing pathogenic bacteria and maintaining the gastrointestinal tract (GIT) pH. This review summarizes the discovery of butyric acid (BA), citric acid (CA) and their salt forms, molecular structure and properties, metabolism, biological functions and their applications in poultry nutrition. The research findings about BA, CA and their salts on rats, pigs and humans are also briefly reviewed. Therefore, this review will fill the knowledge gaps of the scientific community and may be of great interest for poultry nutritionists, researchers and feed manufacturers about these two weak organic acids and their effects on intestinal health and gut microbiota community, with the hope of providing safe, healthy and nutrient-rich poultry products to consumers.

Different levels of synthetic lysine amino acid were supplemented to 240 starter broiler chicks randomly distributed to 12 groups of each 20-day chicks and allocated to four treatment diets in a Completely Randomized Design (CRD). T1 (Control) basal diet (0% synthetic lysine); T2 (0.15% synthetic lysine); T3 (0.3% synthetic lysine) and T4 (0.45% synthetic lysine). There was no significant difference (P>0.05) observed between treatments in dry matter, metabolizable energy, crude protein intake, body weight and death rate of the chicks. In conclusion, there were no significant changes for all parameters and further amino acid analysis of the feedstuffs is required and extra addition above 0.45% synthetic lysine of T4 need to be added in this experiment which numerically improved the chick’s performance. Further experiments were recommended to evaluate the levels of lysine amino acid in the feedstuffs and its inclusion level in to the diet of modern broiler strains.

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