Indices of gastrointestinal fermentation and manure emissions of growing-finishing pigs as influenced through singular or combined consumption of Lactobacillus plantarum and inulin

Abstract

Conventional dietary strategies to reduce pig manure odor may either be costly, or impede nutrient digestibility. Additionally, the response of manure odor to such measures may be variable, indicating a complex relationship between environmental pollutant and diet. We hypothesized that dietary Lactobacillus plantarum (LP), with or without the inclusion of a purified oligofructose (inulin), may reduce odor without compromising nutrient digestibility. An experiment with a 2 × 2 factorial arrangement of treatments was conducted to investigate effects of dietary inulin (0 and 12.5 g/kg) and LP (0 and 0.5 g/kg) on nutrient digestibility, indicators of gastrointestinal tract fermentation, select fecal bacteria, manure content, and ammonia and odor emissions of 28 growing-finishing pigs (60.3 kg; n = 7/treatment). Dietary treatments had no effect on nutrient digestibility. Dietary treatments containing inulin had decreased Enterobacteriaceae (8.60 vs. 9.67 log gene copy number/g fresh feces; P = 0.03) when compared with unsupplemented diets. There was an interaction between dietary inulin concentration and LP supplementation on estimates of fecal Clostridia (P = 0.01). Pigs offered diets containing both inulin and LP in combination had increased Clostridia when compared with those offered the control diet. However, there was no effect of either LP or inulin fecal Clostridia when offered singularly. An interaction was also noted where diets supplemented with LP or inulin only reduced odor (P = 0.01) compared with the control diet. However, there was no effect of LP on manure odor emissions when offered in combination with inulin. In summary, this study demonstrated that dietary supplementation with either exogenous LP or inulin reduces manure odor but not when offered in combination.

Dietary supplementation of plant essential oil improves growth performance, intestinal morphology and health in weaned pigs

“…The integrity of DNA was verified by denaturing agarose gel electrophoresis. Standard curves were generated according to the method described by O'Shea et al ().…”

Pigs that are divergent in feed efficiency, differ in intestinal enzyme and nutrient transporter gene expression, nutrient digestibility and microbial activity

“…For qPCR, standard curves were prepared with pooled aliquots of digesta and faecal microbial genomic DNA for the absolute quantification of bacteria (Lee et al, 2006). Genus-and species-specific primers (Supplementary Table S2) for Lactobacilli, Enterobacteriaceae, Bifidobacteria, Bacteriodes and Firmicutes were used for the estimation of gene copy number in the caecal and colonic digesta using qPCR on the ABI 7500 Real-Time PCR System (Applied Biosystems Ltd, Carlsbad, CA, USA) using the method of O'Shea et al (2012).…”

The Effect of Increasing Inclusion Levels of a Fucoidan-Rich Extract Derived from Ascophyllum nodosum on Growth Performance and Aspects of Intestinal Health of Pigs Post-Weaning

“…Quantitative PCR (QPCR) was used to validate the sequencing results for the following bacterial groups: Bifidobacterium spp., Lactobacillus spp., Enterobacteriaceae and total bacteria. For the QPCR, standard curves were prepared with pooled aliquots of caecal and colonic digesta DNA, as described previously [49]. Domain, genus and family specific primers are presented in Table 12.…”