Intestinal Absorption of Bile Salts in the Cockerel

Abstract

EXPERIMENTS were conducted to study techniques appropriate to the measurement of bile salt absorption in the chicken and to determine the relative absorptive capacity for bile salts of different parts of the mesenteric small intestine. Although intestinal absorption of bile salts has been studied quite extensively in mammalian species, the only reports pertaining to the chicken appear to be those of Glassner et al. (1965) and Webling (1966). METHODSExperiment 1. The rate of intestinal absorption of sodium taurocholate was measured in three mature White Leghorn cockerels. Prior to the determination the birds were starved for 36 hours. The birds were initially anaesthetized with sodium pentobarbital and held under anaesthesia with diethyl ether throughout the experiment, after which they were killed.The procedure for measurement of absorption was as follows. Each bird was placed on its left side. An incision was made along the right side of the abdomen. Ligatures …