Abstract
Improving the predication efficiency of porcine production performance at early stage will contribute to reducing the breeding and production costs. The intestinal microbiota had received plenty of attention in recent years due to their influence on host health and performance. The purpose of this study was to investigate the relationship between the fecal microbiota at early growth period and porcine feed efficiency (FE) under a commercial feeding environment. Ninety-one pigs were reordered according to the residual feed intake (RFI) values between day 90 on test and day 160 off test, 9 lowest RFI pigs and 9 highest RFI pigs were selected as the LRFI group and the HRFI group, respectively. Fecal samples from pigs in the early grower phase (day 80) were performed for microbial diversity, composition, and predicted functionality by using 16S rRNA sequencing. The results showed that no significant differences in microbial alpha diversity were observed between two RFI groups, whereas, some RFI-associated compositional differences were revealed. In particular, the microbiota of the LRFI group (more feed-efficient) had significantly higher levels of some members of Clostridiales and Bacteroidales (e.g., g_1_68 and g_norank_f_p_2534_18B5), which may promoted FE through protecting gut barrier function, compared with those of the HRFI pigs. Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes (KEGG) pathways analysis found that the LRFI pigs were likely have microbiota with higher levels of amino acid metabolism. Moreover, redundancy analysis (RDA) showed that litter size, parity, and date of birth had significant effects on the bacterial community structure. These results improved our knowledge of the porcine early-life fecal microbiota and its potential link underlying RFI, which would be useful for future development of microbial biomarkers for predicting and improving porcine FE as well as investigation of targets for dietary strategies.
Highlights
Feed accounts for more than 60% of total production costs in growing pigs
We aimed to investigate the possible relationship between the fecal microbiota and residual feed intake (RFI) trait of growing stage pigs under a commercial environment
Feed intake (DFI) and individual body weights (BW) data were recorded by Electronic Feed Intake Recording Equipment (FIRE, Osborne, USA) and used to calculate performance indicators, such as average daily feed intake (ADFI), average daily gain (ADG), and feed conversion ratio (FCR)
Summary
Feed accounts for more than 60% of total production costs in growing pigs. improving FE has been an important part of the breeding goal in commercial pig production for both economic and environmental reasons. The early colonization and succession of intestinal microbiome has been found to be important for the formation of host phenotypes and specific microbial composition (Collins et al 2017; Han et al 2017; Tian et al 2017). Little is known about whether the composition of fecal microbiome in young pigs might be used to predict the phenotype of grower-finisher hosts. We aimed to investigate the possible relationship between the fecal microbiota and RFI trait of growing stage pigs under a commercial environment. We compared the composition and potential functionality of the fecal microbiota in LRFI and HRFI Duroc pigs using 16S rRNA gene sequencing, and analyzed the effects of host and environmental factors on the microbial community structure
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