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The objective of the study was to determine the effects of antibiotics, yeast culture (YC), and Lactobacillus culture (LC) on the gut microbiome and metabolites in the serum and caecum of weaning piglets. Twenty-four weaning piglets were divided into four treatment groups: control, antibiotic (1% chlortetracycline), 1.8% yeast culture (YC), and 1.6% Lactobacillus culture groups (LC). Each group had six replicated pens with one pig per pen. Feed and water were available ad libitum. Dietary supplementation with antibiotics, YC and LC increased the abundance of phylum, Firmicutes, and decreased the abundance of phylum, Proteobacteria. Beneficial bacteria such as Lactobacillus and Megasphaera in YC and LC groups increased, whereas the proportion of Shigella was decreased. Genera Alloprevotella and Lachnospira were biomarkers in the control and antibiotic groups, respectively. Phylum, Bacteroidetes, and genus, Collinsella, were biomarkers in the YC group, and Mitsuokella, Anaerotruncus, Syntrophococcus and Sharpea were biomarkers in the LC group. Dietary supplementation with different probiotics changed the serum and caecum metabolite profiles too. Antibiotic supplementation increased the levels of D-mannose, D-glucose, and hexadecanoic acid in the serum, and the levels of myo-inositol, D-mannose and benzenepropanoic acid in the caecum. LC increased the concentrations of D-mannose, cis-9-hexadecenoic acid and heptadecanoic acid in caecum compared with the control group. YC and LC supplementation in the weaning diet could improve the abundance of beneficial bacteria by changing the concentrations of some metabolites in the serum and caecum. Therefore, dietary supplementation with YC or LC could be used as additives instead of antibiotics in weaning piglets.

Background Neuromedin U (NMU) plays an important role in activating the group 2 innate lymphoid cells (ILC2s) and initiating the host’s anti-parasitic immune responses. It is aimed to explore the distribution characteristics of NMU in the sheep small intestine and the influence of Moniezia benedeni infection on them. In the present study, the pET-28a-NMU recombinant plasmids were constructed, and Escherichia coli. BL21 (DE3) were induced to express the recombinant protein. And then, the rabbit anti-sheep NMU polyclonal antibody was prepared and immunofluorescence staining was performed with it. The expression levels of NMU in the intestine of normal and Moniezia benedeni-infected sheep were detected by ELISA. Results The results showed that the molecular weight of the obtained NMU recombinant protein was consistent with the expected molecular (13 kDa) and it was expressed in the form of inclusion body. The titer and specificity of obtained rabbit anti-sheep NMU polyclonal antibody were good. The results of immunofluorescence analysis showed that the nerve fibers which specifically expressed NMU mainly extended from the ganglion in the submucosal to lamina propria (LP) in the sheep small intestine, and the expression level was relatively high; especially on the nerve fibers of LP around the intestinal glands. The expression levels were gradually increased from the duodenum to the ileum, and the levels in the jejunum and ileum were significantly higher than that in the duodenum (P < 0.05). In addition, scattered NMU positive cells were distributed in the epithelium of the jejunal crypts. Moniezia benedeni infection increased the expression of NMU in each intestinal segment, especially in the jejunum and ileum there were significant increase (P < 0.05). Conclusions It was suggested that Moniezia benedeni infection could be detected by the high expression of NMU in sheep enteric nervous, and which laid the foundation for further studies on whether NMU exerts anti-parasitic immunity by activating ILC2s. In addition, NMU was expressed in some intestinal gland epitheliums, which also provided a basis for studying its roles in regulation of the immune homeostasis. The present study laid the foundation for further revealing the molecular mechanism of sheep’s neural-immune interaction network perceiving the colacobiosis of parasites.

Focusing on the bottlenecks of traditional physical activation method for the preparation of activated carbons (ACs), we established a simple and scalable method to control the physicochemical structure of ACs and study their CO2 adsorption performance. The preparation is achieved by ammonia activation at different volume fractions of ammonia in the mixture (10%, 25%, 50%, 75%, and 100%) to introduce the nitrogen-containing functional groups and form the original pores and subsequent chemical vapor deposition (CVD) at different deposition times (30, 60, 90, and 120 min) to further adjust the pore structure. The nitrogen content of ACs-0.1/0.25/0.5/0.75/1 increases gradually from 2.11% to 8.84% with the increase of ammonia ratio in the mixture from 10% to 75% and then decreases to 3.02% in the process of pure ammonia activation (100%), during which the relative content of pyridinium nitrogen (N-6), pyrrolidine (N-5), and graphite nitrogen (N-Q) increase sequentially but nitrogen oxygen structure (N-O) increase continuously. In addition, ACs-0.5 and ACs-0.75, with a relatively high nitrogen content (6.37% and 8.84%) and SBET value (1048.65 m2/g and 814.36 m2/g), are selected as typical samples for subsequent CVD. In the stage of CVD, ACs-0.5-60 and ACs-0.75-90, with high SBET (1897.25 and 1971.57 m2/g) value and an appropriate pore-size distribution between 0.5 and 0.8 nm, can be obtained with the extension of deposition time from 60 to 90 min. The results of CO2 adsorption test indicate that an adsorption capacity of ACs-0.75-90, at 800 mmHg, is the largest (6.87 mmol/g) out of all the tested samples. In addition, the comparison of CO2 adsorption performance of tested samples with different nitrogen content and pore structure indicates that the effect of nitrogen content seems to be more pronounced in this work.