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Recent studies have suggested that a high-fructose diet leads to the development of metabolic syndrome in mammals. However, relatively little information is available regarding the absorption of fructose in the chicken intestine. We therefore investigated fructose absorption and its transporters in the chicken small intestine. The gene expression of three transporters (glucose transporter protein member 2 and 5 and sodium-dependent glucose transporter protein 1) in the jejunum of fasted chicks were lower than those in chicks fed ad libitum. The everted intestinal sacs (in vitro method for investigating intestinal absorption) showed that the concentration of fructose uptake rapidly increased within 15 min after incubation, and then gradually increased until 60 min. After 15 min of incubation, fructose uptake in the ad libitum chick intestine was approximately 2-fold that in the fasted intestine and was less than half of the glucose uptake in the ad libitum chick intestine. Our results suggest that fructose is absorbed in the small intestine of chicks and that uptake is decreased by fasting treatment with decreases in the mRNA expression of related transporters.

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The aim of this study was to investigate the differences in fearfulness between two Japanese native chicken breeds, Tosa‐Kukin (TOK) and Yakido (YKD). In a tonic immobility test, TOK breed chicks showed longer duration and lower induction number compared with YKD. The number of peeps in YKD in an isolation test was lower than that in TOK, whereas there were more bouts of peeping in YKD than in TOK. In a manual restraint test, YKD showed more active responses and initiated peeps and struggling earlier than TOK. The three behavioral tests all indicated that YKD are less fearful than TOK chickens. A latent structures discriminant (OPLS‐DA) analysis was used to identify behavioral parameters that contributed to the differences between the breeds. The major parameters were duration and number of inductions in the tonic immobility test and number of struggle in the manual restraint test. These results suggest that three behavioral tests can be used together to evaluate fearfulness of Japanese native breeds of chickens.

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