Abstract
Biotechnological advances in animal health and nutrition continue to play a significant role in the improvement of animal health, growth, and production performance. These biotechnological advancements, especially the use of direct-fed microbials, also termed probiotics, those genetically modified and otherwise, have minimized many challenges facing livestock production around the world. Such advancements result in healthy animals and animal products, such as meat, for a growing population worldwide. Increasing demand for productivity, healthy animals, and consumer food safety concerns, especially those emanating from excessive use of antibiotics or growth promoters, are a driving force for investing in safer alternatives, such as probiotics. The advent of vastly diverse pathogens and bacterial organisms, some of which have acquired antimicrobial resistance due to therapeutic use of these antibiotics, has had a negative impact on the animal and food industries. Probiotics have been chosen as substitutes to counter this excessive use of antibiotics and antibiotic resistance. Over the last decade, probiotics have gained recognition, increased in importance, and stimulated growing interest in the animal health and nutrition industry. Probiotics are considered to be favorable live microorganisms by the host organism by maintaining microbial homeostasis and healthy gut, and can be a viable alternative to antibiotics in addition to providing other growth-promoting properties. Even though various studies describe the modes of action of probiotics, more research is needed to illuminate the exact mechanism of action of probiotics and how they benefit the host. This review describes the importance of probiotics in animal health, nutrition, and in growth and production performance. It also provides a thorough review of recent advances in probiotics research and application in animal health and nutrition and future directions on probiotic research to enhance animal performance.
Highlights
In 1965, the term “probiotic” was first introduced by Lilly and Stillwell [1] to describe growth-promoting factors produced by microorganisms
[21], on the host, being nonpathogenic and nontoxic in nature, withinclude the ability to survive for a proposed some specific characteristics of probiotics, which showing favorable long time with high cell counts, their ability survive through thewith digestive system effect on the host, being nonpathogenic andtonontoxic in nature, the ability to passage survive and colonize the gastrointestinal tract (GIT)
When it comes to the livestock feeding and medicine, besides lactic acid bacteria and other non-pathogenic microorganisms with health-promoting characteristics, certain strains of yeast, Saccharomyces boulardii and Escherichia coli such as E. coli Nissle 1917, have been employed [36]
Summary
In 1965, the term “probiotic” was first introduced by Lilly and Stillwell [1] to describe growth-promoting factors produced by microorganisms. Studies showed that therapeutic use of these antimicrobials in animals has contributed to the emergence of antimicrobial resistance This allows antibiotic resistance to be transferred to humans, reducing the effectiveness of antimicrobial drugs for treating human diseases [7]. LAB are Gram-positive facultative aerobic or anaerobic cocci or rod shaped bacteria They produce Lactic acid as the major metabolic end product of carbohydrate fermentation. LAB are generally recognized as safe due to their ubiquitous appearance in food and their contribution to the healthy microbiota of animal and human mucosal surfaces. Due to their beneficial and nonpathogenic effects, LAB are considered to be potential probiotics. Das et al and Augustine et al revealed several promising results of genus Streptomyces as probiotics in aquaculture [13,14]
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