Abstract
BackgroundThe chicken intestinal microbiota plays a large role in chicken health and productivity and a greater understanding of its development may lead to interventions to improve chicken nutrition, disease resistance and welfare.ResultsIn this study we examine the duodenal, jejunal, ileal and caecal microbiota of chickens from day of hatch to 5 weeks of age (day 1, 3, 7, 14 and week 5). DNA was extracted from intestinal content samples and the V4 region of the 16S rRNA gene was amplified and sequenced. We identified significant differences in microbial community composition, diversity and richness between samples taken from different locations within the chicken intestinal tract. We also characterised the development of the microbiota at each intestinal site over time.ConclusionsOur study builds upon existing literature to further characterise the development of the chicken intestinal microbiota.
Highlights
The chicken intestinal microbiota plays a large role in chicken health and productivity and a greater understanding of its development may lead to interventions to improve chicken nutrition, disease resistance and welfare
The number of Operational taxonomic units (OTU) shared between sample types within timepoints and between timepoints within sample types can be found in Additional file 3: Figures S1 and S2
Gaining an insight into how the microbiota changes over time at specific sites in the small intestine may lead to a better understanding of the microbial ecology of the chicken gut
Summary
The chicken intestinal microbiota plays a large role in chicken health and productivity and a greater understanding of its development may lead to interventions to improve chicken nutrition, disease resistance and welfare. To do so would require a good understanding of the types of microbes which naturally occur in these animals and the role they play in nutrition and health. The caecal microbiota has been suggested to play an important role in nutrition via the production of short chain fatty acids, nitrogen recycling and amino acid production [6,7,8]. Several studies have examined samples from the small intestine which are less rich and diverse than caecal samples and contain a high abundance of Lactobacilli [12, 14, 17, 18, 20, 23,24,25]
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