Abstract
Dogs occupy a full place in the family, and their well-being is of paramount importance to their owners. Digestion, a complex process involving physicochemical, mechanical, and microbial parameters, plays a central role in maintaining canine health. As in vivo studies in dogs are increasingly restricted by ethical, regulatory, societal, and cost pressures, an alternative option is the use of in vitro models simulating the different compartments of the canine gastrointestinal tract. This review introduces digestion and gut microbiota as key factors in dog nutrition and health under both healthy and diseased conditions (obesity and inflammatory bowel disease) and highlights similarities and differences between the human and canine digestive tract and processes. We provide the first in-depth description of currently available models of the canine digestive tract, discuss technical and scientific challenges that need to be addressed, and introduce potential applications of in vitro gut models in the food and veterinary fields. Even if the development of some in vitro models is still limited by a lack of in vivo data in dogs that is necessary for relevant configuration and validation, translation of long-term expertise on human in vitro gut models to dogs opens avenues for model optimization and adaptation to specific canine digestive conditions associated with various dog ages, sizes, breeds and/or diets, in both physiological and diseased states.
Highlights
We provide an in-depth description of all the available in vitro models of the canine digestive tract before discussing limitations and challenges associated to the development of in vitro gut models of healthy or diseased dogs, and their applications in food and veterinary fields
This paper considers the entire canine gastrointestinal tract (GIT) and associated microbiota and highlights similarities and differences between dog and human digestive physiology to provide new opportunities for canine in vitro gut simulation
Concerning functional activity, there is no significant difference in fecal short-chain fatty acid (SCFA) concentrations between inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) and healthy dogs but a lower indole concentration was measured in diseased dogs (Xu et al, 2016; Pilla and Suchodolski, 2020)
Summary
At the interface between petfood and veterinary compounds, pets’ nutritional supplements represent a specific expanding market with huge range of products. Providing alternative methods before performing in vivo trials can be of interest to match with owners, regulatory, and health expectations and go deeper into mechanistic aspects This requires a comprehensive understanding of dog digestive processes. The gut microbiota and its involvement in dog nutrition and health is becoming a more and more important topic All these digestive components affect food digestibility, nutrient absorption, and energy release, and drug metabolism and absorption, and survival of probiotic microorganisms. Future development of new products needs to take into account dog’s weight and all the variations in digestion process associated to different canine sizes and breeds to move towards personalized nutrition and veterinary medicine
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