Intestinal microbiota associated with differential feed conversion efficiency in chickens

Abstract

Analysis of model systems, for example in mice, has shown that the microbiota in the gastrointestinal tract can play an important role in the efficiency of energy extraction from diets. The study reported here aimed to determine whether there are correlations between gastrointestinal tract microbiota population structure and energy use in chickens. Efficiency in converting food into muscle mass has a significant impact on the intensive animal production industries, where feed represents the major portion of production costs. Despite extensive breeding and selection efforts, there are still large differences in the growth performance of animals fed identical diets and reared under the same conditions. Variability in growth performance presents management difficulties and causes economic loss. An understanding of possible microbiota drivers of these differences has potentially important benefits for industry. In this study, differences in cecal and jejunal microbiota between broiler chickens with extreme feed conversion capabilities were analysed in order to identify candidate bacteria that may influence growth performance. The jejunal microbiota was largely dominated by lactobacilli (over 99% of jejunal sequences) and showed no difference between the birds with high and low feed conversion ratios. The cecal microbial community displayed higher diversity, and 24 unclassified bacterial species were found to be significantly (<0.05) differentially abundant between high and low performing birds. Such differentially abundant bacteria represent target populations that could potentially be modified with prebiotics and probiotics in order to improve animal growth performance.

Taxons of Chicken Cecum Microbiom Are Abundant, and Influenced by the Combined Feed Composition and Decreased Metabolizable Energy

“…In cecum, the representatives of phylum Firmicutes and families Ruminococcaceae (19,81±0,97 %) and Clostridiaceae (23,06±1,19 %) having amyloid and cellulolytic enzymes and of phylum Bacteroidetes (29,60±1.49 %) with amylo-and proteolytic activity were predominant. Our results confirmed the data of several authors who have demonstrated by NGS sequencing predominance of phylum Firmicutes [19,21] and genera Clostridium and Bacteroides bacteria [23] in broiler cecum. At the same time, our results are contrary to other reports which indicated the dominance of the phylum Proteobacteria representatives [22].…”

“…Microbiology of digestion is very complex and poorly understood [7][8][9][ which, in particular, explains the relevance of the research of poultry intestine under different diets. Most of the available information about this microflora was obtained using classical microbiological methods, according to which the basis a community is made up with bifidobacteria, streptococci, lactobacilli, lactate fermenting bacteria, eubacteria, bacteroides and enterobacteria [3,10,11], but, obviously, a substantial part of the gastrointestinal tract (GIT) microorganisms are the uncultured species [12].…”

“…Despite the widespread use of these methods to study of numbers and taxonomic diversity of microbes in the human intestine [17,18], there are only a few reports on poultry. In particular, they relate to the GIT microbiome state in poultry infected by pathogenic bacteria Campylobacter jejuni [19,20] due to the effects of coccidiostats [21] and in relation to the productivity [22,23].…”

Quantitative molecular assays for evaluating changes in broiler gut microbiota linked with diet and performance

“…Several studies have already used pyrotag sequencing to investigate the community structure of the chicken gut (Callaway et al 2009;Yin et al 2010;Hume et al 2011;Stanley et al 2012). Although this methodology gives a detailed phylogenetic description of the complexity of the microbial community, quantitative interpretation of results should be performed with some caution (Amend et al 2010;Zhou et al 2011).…”

Identification of differential duodenal gene expression levels and microbiota abundance correlated with differences in energy utilisation in chickens

“…All birds were given ad libitum access to a broiler grower diet previously described in Stanley et al (2012) that met or exceeded National Research Council guidelines for broiler chickens (NRC 1994). The feed contained 44.4% of wheat, 17% soybean meal, 15% barley, 10% canola meal, 5% peas, 3.2% meat meal, 3% tallow, 1% limestone, 0.5% vitamin mix, and traces of salt, lysine HCl, DL-methionine and threonine.…”