ContextSelenium is an essential micronutrient that plays an important role in livestock nutrition.AimsThe present experiment was conducted to evaluate the effects of green synthesised nano-selenium (GNS) on growth, carcass characteristics, meat quality and blood indices of broiler chickens when compared with sodium selenite (SS) as inorganic selenium.MethodsA total of 360 1-day-old Ross 308 broiler chickens were randomly divided into four experimental treatments, with six replicates of 15 birds per each. The treatments were as follows: (1) basal diet supplemented with 0.15mg/kg of SS (control group), and (2–4) basal diet supplemented with 0.075, 0.15 and 0.3mg/kg of GNS, respectively.Key resultsThe results showed that there was no influence of GNS supplementation on the growth of broiler chickens (P>0.05). The relative weights of the carcass, breast, leg, pancreas, gizzard, and abdominal fat at 21 and 42 days were not affected by treatment. However, at 42 days, the lowest relative weight of the liver was for birds fed diets containing 0.3mg/kg GNS. Compared with SS, the meat of birds fed GNS dietary supplements at 0.3mg/kg had greater water-holding capacity, redness, yellowness and chroma values, and lower meat thiobarbituric acid reactive substances and drip loss values (P<0.05). Compared with SS, broiler chickens fed diets supplemented with GNS at 0.3mg/kg had greater amounts of total protein in serum. In this study, no major differences were observed in serum glucose, cholesterol, lipoprotein, thyroid hormone, and liver function levels and biomarkers of kidney function.ConclusionsTaken together, the findings from this study indicate that GNS improved the quality of meat relative to SS, but had no effect on growth efficiency, carcass characteristics or broiler blood indices.ImplicationsThese results provide a basis for the application of eco-friendly GNS as an alternative of inorganic selenium in a mineral premix in chicken broiler diets.
