Abstract
The experiment was to determine the chronic effects of two transgenic maize lines that contained the mCry1Ac gene from the Bacillus thuringiensis strain (BT) and the maroACC gene from Agrobacterium tumefaciens strain (CC), respectively, on ileal microbiota of laying hens. Seventy-two laying hens were randomly assigned to one of the three dietary treatments for 12 weeks, as follows: (1) nontransgenic near-isoline maize-based diet (CT diet), (2) BT maize-based diet (BT diet), and (3) CC maize-based diet (CC diet). Ileum histological examination did not indicate a chronic effect of two transgenic maize diets. Few differences were observed in any bacterial taxa among the treatments that used high-throughput 16S rRNA gene sequencing. The only differences that were observed for bacterial genera were that Bifidobacterium belong within the Bifidobacteriaceae family tended to be greater (p = 0.114) abundant in hens fed the transgenic maize-based diet than in hens fed the CT diet. Birds that consumed the CC maize diet tended to have less abundance (p = 0.135) of Enterobacteriaceae family in the ileum than those that consumed the CT maize diet. These results indicate the lack of adverse effects of the BT maize and the CC maize lines on the ileal microbiota of hens for long term and provide important data regarding biosafety assessment of the transgenic maize lines.
Highlights
Consumers are becoming increasingly aware of the important effect of certain food on the intestinal microbiota [1], because a strong relationship between intestinal microbiota and host health is found in the recent analysis of the intestinal microbiome [2,3]
A transgenic maize line was produced by the insertion of the mCry1Ac gene that was derived from Bacillus thuringiensis strain (BT) and transcription of the mCry1Ac gene confers resistance to insect damage [9]
No major differences were observed between the BT maize or CC maize and the CT maize, and almost all of the values remained within the natural range of variation in maize varieties cited in the literature [29,30,31] (Table 1)
Summary
Consumers are becoming increasingly aware of the important effect of certain food on the intestinal microbiota [1], because a strong relationship between intestinal microbiota and host health is found in the recent analysis of the intestinal microbiome [2,3]. A transgenic maize line was produced by the insertion of the mCry1Ac gene that was derived from Bacillus thuringiensis strain (BT) and transcription of the mCry1Ac gene confers resistance to insect damage [9]. Another transgenic maize line was produced by the insertion of the maroACC gene derived from the Agrobacterium tumefaciens strain (CC) and a gene shuffling process to optimize the kinetics of glyphosate acetyltransferase activity for acetylating the herbicide glyphosate functionally improved the maroACC gene [9]. The development of transgenic maize provides growers with such benefits [10], but its presence of food and feed has been the focus of attention that is related to potential health risks
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