Curing piglets from diarrhea and preparation of a healthy microbiome with Bacillus treatment for industrial animal breeding

Shousong Yue,Zhentian Li,Fuli Hu,Jean-François Picimbon

doi:10.1038/s41598-020-75207-1

Abstract

High-throughput farming of animals for an essential purpose such as large scale health and production of hogs is a challenge for the food industry in the modern world. The problem is that the breeding of livestock for fast growth or high yields of meat is often associated with illness and microbial infection that develop under the breeding conditions. Piglet diarrhea is most common pig disease, leading to heavy mortality and thereby economic loss. We proved that chemical drugs can relieve the symptoms of diarrhea in ill piglets, but they do not treat the underlying cause, i.e. significantly altered bacterial gut flora. Using Illumina sequencing of fecal DNA, we showed that the bacterial gut flora of piglets treated with antibiotics remain close to the ill conditions. However, using Illumina sequencing of fecal DNA from piglets treated with a specific Bacillus (Bacillus subtilis Y-15, B. amyloliquefaciens DN6502 and B. licheniformis SDZD02) demonstrated the efficiency of natural bioproducts not only on curing diarrhea, but also on beneficial bacteria to re-establish in the piglet gut. We therefore propose a new natural “medicine” to be explored by the world farm animal agriculture industry, particularly for sustainable improvement of swine livestock production and health.

Highlights

High-throughput farming of animals for an essential purpose such as large scale health and production of hogs is a challenge for the food industry in the modern world
Piglet diarrhea disease common to both the neonatal and the post-weaning stages can be a cause of the high level of mortality in the nursery beds and can seriously challenge the outcome of intensive animal farming or industrial livestock production worldwide
We show that antibiotic treatments are inefficient to restore the normal healthy control gut bacterial flora in the piglet intestine and unable to re-establish healthy conditions in piglets

Summary

Introduction

High-throughput farming of animals for an essential purpose such as large scale health and production of hogs is a challenge for the food industry in the modern world. To many other domesticated animals, i.e. those raised in an agricultural setting to produce food, pigs and piglets suffer various infections that can come from their environment, nutrition, internal parasites, viruses, bacterial microbes and/or a combination of all[2]. This represents a major threat for agronomic health and eventually for human health, as there are cases of influenza or other infectious disease passed on to humans from pigs[3,4]. Ill animals usually grow sick and lose weight, which strongly challenges the ethics and the meat supply quality at the international level[7,8]

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