Abstract
The current study was conducted to investigate the effect of dietary tributyrin (TB) administration on the intestinal and growth performances in Arbor Acres (AA) broilers under an isocaloric feeding regime. A total of 540 day-old healthy AA broilers were randomly assigned to five treatments with 12 replicates (pens) per treatment and nine birds per pen for 42 days. The dietary treatments were basal diet (control) and basal diet with TB at doses of 0.23 g/kg (TB1), 0.46 g/kg (TB2), 0.92 g/kg (TB3), and 1.84 g/kg (TB4). Particularly, to achieve the isocaloric and cost-saving experimental diets, soybean oil was replaced by the TB product (Eucalorie®) with equivalent metabolic energy contents, and the formulas were rebalanced with zeolite to get the sum of all the feed ingredients to 100%. On days 21 and 42, after weighing, the birds (one bird per replicate) whose body weight was close to the replicate average were euthanized to investigate the effect of dietary TB on intestinal morphology, intestinal bacterial population, and short-chain fatty acid contents. The results revealed that dietary TB administration increased the average daily gain, gain/feed ratio, and European broiler index (P < 0.05) and improved the intestinal morphology (P < 0.05) as indicated by higher villus height and the ratios of villus height/crypt depth in broilers. The incremental levels of TB increased the ileal Lactobacillus content (P = 0.05) and cecal Bacillus content (P = 0.02), respectively. Moreover, dietary TB administration also increased the contents of most of the selected short-chain fatty acids in ileal and cecal digesta (P < 0.05). Collectively, dietary TB administration quadratically improved the growth performance, intestinal morphology, beneficial bacterial population, and short-chain fatty acid levels under the isocaloric feeding regime, indicating better profit return potential in practical poultry operation.
Highlights
Unlike beef and pork, poultry meat is widely consumed due to its favorable and nutritive value and because it is free from cultural or religious restrictions (Henchion et al, 2014)
In order to achieve an isocaloric level in each formula, the soybean oil was replaced by the TB product (Eucalorie R ) with equivalent metabolic energy content, and the formulas were rebalanced with zeolite to get the sum of all the feed ingredients to 100%
It is of great interest that dietary butyrate intervention improved the apparent metabolizable energy (Kaczmarek et al, 2016), ileal energy digestible coefficient (Liu et al, 2017), and apparent ileal digestibility of methionine (Moquet et al, 2018) in broilers
Summary
Poultry meat is widely consumed due to its favorable and nutritive value and because it is free from cultural or religious restrictions (Henchion et al, 2014). The intestinal tract is the place for nutrient digestion and absorption and the largest immune organ for the protection of the body from adverse challenges, such as infectious pathogenic bacteria, virus, and parasites (Sunkara et al, 2011; Kiela and Ghishan, 2016; Citi, 2018); there is a growing need worldwide to explore strategies able to maintain the integrity of intestinal morphology and modulate the intestinal function In this regard, butyrate would be a promising choice, as it has been well demonstrated to play fundamental roles in modulating the intestinal structure and microbial composition (Yang et al, 2018; Wang et al, 2019a; Sotira et al, 2020). Butyrate derivate products proved to be a valid aid for gut health maintenance
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