Abstract
BackgroundNegative experiences in early life can induce long-lasting effects on the welfare, health, and performance of farm animals. A delayed placement of chicks in rearing houses has negative effects on their performance, and results in fecal-specific odors detectable by rats. Based on this observation, the volatile organic compounds (VOCs) and metabolites from the feces of 12-day-old chickens were screened for early markers of response to negative events using gas-chromatography and liquid-chromatography coupled with mass spectrometry (GC-MS, LC-HRMS).ResultsThe low reproducibility of solid-phase micro-extraction of the VOCs followed by GC-MS was not suitable for marker discovery, in contrast to liquid extraction of metabolites from freeze-dried feces followed by GC-MS or LC-HRMS analysis. Therefore, the fecal metabolome from 12-day-old chicks having experienced a normal or delayed placement were recorded by GC-MS and LC-HRMS in two genotypes from two experiments. From both experiments, 25 and 35 metabolites, respectively explaining 81% and 45% of the difference between delayed and control chickens, were identified by orthogonal partial least-squares discriminant analysis from LC-HRMS and GC-MS profiling.ConclusionThe sets of molecules identified will be useful to better understand the chicks’ response to negative events over time and will contribute to define stress or welfare biomarkers.
Highlights
Negative experiences in early life can induce long-lasting effects on the welfare, health, and performance of farm animals
Liquid extraction of freeze-dried feces followed by LC-HRMS or Gaseous chromatography coupled with mass spectrometry (GC-MS) was reproducible, and the OPLSDA model fitted on those data highlights persisting differences in adaptive response, energy metabolism, and microbiota composition for the delayed chicks in response to the negative postnatal experience
Fecal volatile organic compounds (VOC) annotated after headspace solid-phase microextraction coupled with GC-MS
Summary
Negative experiences in early life can induce long-lasting effects on the welfare, health, and performance of farm animals. A delayed placement of chicks in rearing houses has negative effects on their performance, and results in fecal-specific odors detectable by rats Based on this observation, the volatile organic compounds (VOCs) and metabolites from the feces of 12-day-old chickens were screened for early markers of response to negative events using gas-chromatography and liquid-chromatography coupled with mass spectrometry (GC-MS, LC-HRMS). The chicks can be exposed to various factors such as temperature variations, confinement, and movement or vibrations during transportation without access to water and feed for up to 3 d This postnatal environment can influence the behavior of adult broilers [2], their performance (i.e. body weight, feed conversion ratio, Pectoralis major muscle weight) [3, 4], their susceptibility to diseases that could lead to death [5], which impacts animal welfare with economic and social issues. Some advances have recently been achieved in chickens to predict or to have a better understanding of quality or digestive physiology issues using blood, muscle, and digestive content metabolomes [11,12,13]
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