Identification of circulating metabolites associated with wooden breast and white striping

Abstract

Current diagnostic methods for wooden breast and white striping, common breast muscle myopathies of modern commercial broiler chickens, rely on subjective examinations of the pectoralis major muscle, time-consuming microscopy, or expensive imaging technologies. Further research on these disorders would benefit from more quantitative and objective measures of disease severity that can be used in live birds. To this end, we utilized untargeted metabolomics alongside two statistical approaches to evaluate plasma metabolites associated with wooden breast and white striping in 250 male commercial broiler chickens. First, mixed linear modeling was employed to identify metabolites with a significant association with these muscle disorders and found 98 metabolites associated with wooden breast and 44 metabolites associated with white striping (q-value < 0.05). Second, a support vector machine was constructed using stepwise feature selection to determine the smallest subset of metabolites with the highest categorization accuracy for wooden breast. The final support vector machine achieved 94% accuracy using only 6 metabolites. The metabolite 3-methylhistidine, which is often used as an index of myofibrillar breakdown in skeletal muscle, was the top metabolite for both wooden breast and white striping in our mixed linear model and was also the metabolite with highest marginal prediction accuracy (82%) for wooden breast in our support vector machine. Overall, this study identified a candidate set of metabolites for an objective measure of wooden breast or white striping severity in live birds and expanded our understanding of these muscle disorders.

Metabolomic Analysis of Wooden Breast Myopathy Shows a Disturbed Lipid Metabolism

“…The results of the PLS-DA analysis in the current study imply that WB and WS do not share a similar metabolic profile, but rather, express different changes in metabolite profiles, even if pathophysiological similarities might occur between the two diseases. Our results also imply that the metabolomics profile can be used to differentiate the two groups, in line with observations in the literature [ 34 ].…”

“…The rate of anserine synthesis in skeletal muscle is dependent on the amount of circulating beta-alanine. In line with these findings, a recently published article on metabolomics in WB-affected birds indicated that 3-methyl-histidine was the top metabolite being affected in plasma, with eight more metabolites involved in histidine metabolism being affected, further indicating the effect WB occurrence has on histidine metabolism [ 34 ]. Surprisingly, though, a study feeding high levels of histidine indicated no effects on meat quality, even though a higher level of carnosine was observed [ 42 ].…”

“…In line with this antioxidant effect, a significant increase in selenium was observed in WB birds. Synthesis of GSH is driven by the activity of the pentose phosphate pathway [ 49 ], which has been shown to be influenced by WB in previously published literature [ 34 , 41 ]. They indicated that WB affected purine metabolism, which was a result of the increased activity of the pentose phosphate pathway or a decreased nucleotide utilization.…”

Effects of the Addition of Trichoderma reesei Cellulase to Broiler Chicken Diets for a 21-Day Period

“…The main functions of these molecules include maintaining blood volume through colloidal osmotic effects, participating in blood pH maintenance, hormone and drug transport, cellular coagulation, and catalyzing (enzymes) and regulating (hormones) biological processes [75]. Some proteins are also indispensable in inflammatory, immune, and tissue regeneration and repair processes, where they are called acute-phase proteins [59,76].…”

Integrative transcriptomic and metabolomic analysis reveals alterations in energy metabolism and mitochondrial functionality in broiler chickens with wooden breast

“…Khumpeerawat and colleagues reported moderate correlation between CARNS1 levels and carnosine content in chickens, with both having an inverse relationship with bird age 29 . In addition, 3-methyl-histidine was considered a marker for myofibrillar breakdown and found to have high prediction accuracy for WB 32 . Dietary supplementation of betaalanine and histidine led to increased carnosine levels synthesized in both slow and fast-growing chickens 30,33 , which in turn may potentially increase antioxidant capacity 30,33,34 .…”