Pasture flock chicken cecal microbiome responses to prebiotics and plum fiber feed amendments

Abstract

When prebiotics and other fermentation substrates are delivered to animals as feed supplements, the typical goal is to improve weight gain and feed conversion. In this work, we examined pasture flock chicken cecal contents using next generation sequencing (NGS) to identify and understand the composition of the microbiome when prebiotics and fermentation substrates were supplemented. We generated 16S rRNA sequencing data for 120 separate cecal samples from groups of chickens receiving one of 3 prebiotics or fiber feed additives. The data indicated that respective feed additives enrich for specific bacterial community members and modulate the diversity of the microbiome. We applied synthetic learning in microbial ecology (SLiME) analysis to interpret 16S rRNA microbial community data and identify specific bacterial operational taxonomic units (OTU) that are predictive of the particular feed additives used in these experiments. The results suggest that feed can influence microbiome composition in a predictable way, and thus diet may have indirect effects on weight gain and feed conversion through the microbiome.

Growth performance, carcass characteristics, meat and egg quality, and intestinal microbiota in Beijing-you chicken on diets with inclusion of fresh chicory forage

“…Various dietary strategies have been used to improve the poultry growth performance and feed efficiency, such as probiotics including Bacillus subtilis and Lactobacillus sp. Fathi et al 2018), prebiotics including fructooligosaccharides and galactooligosaccharides (Park et al 2017), forage products including alfalfa meal (Zheng et al 2019) and other natural products including green tea (Xia et al 2018). In this study, however, chickens fed diets containing chicory forage had a lower feed efficiency compared to those fed a basal diet.…”

Gut Microbial succession during conventionalization of germfree chicken

“…The differences between individual birds were more pronounced at 9 d as indicated by PCA plot (Figure 3 A). Similar variation in microbial composition between the experimental birds has been reported previously (1,2). Similar to our findings where 18 d old samples clustered together, the microbial communities from older broiler chicken clustered with less variation than communities from younger birds (35).…”

“…There are few published reports on microbiome of feral chickens (Ferrario, Alessandri et al 2017). However, the microbial population in the cecum of the pasture-housed chickens at the age of 2, 4, and 6 wk was studied recently using 16S sequencing (2). The birds were kept in conventional housing pens for first 2 wk and were released to the pasture for up to 6 wk of age.…”

Application of culturomics to characterize diverse anaerobic bacteria from the gastrointestinal tract of broiler chickens in relation to environmental reservoirs

“…In their work, bacteria within the ceca of cockerels (White Cornish cockerel × White Rock hens) were isolated using roll tubes; the isolated bacteria included members of the genera Bacteroides, Propionibacterium, Eubacterium, and Clostridium. More recently, culturomic approaches have been applied to avian breeds to elucidate the impacts of diet and stressors on the GIT microbiota (Park et al 2017;Zou et al 2018). To realize the goal of generating a collection of GIT bacteria from chickens that are representative of the GIT microbiota, it is important to develop and evaluate anaerobic isolation strategies.…”