The intensive development of domestic poultry farming determines the urgent need to achieve the environmental safety of the industry's products, which excludes the introduction of feed antibiotics into the poultry diet. In addition, the existing instability in the market for domestic biological products, whose share is currently no more than 40% and continues to decline steadily, dictates the need to search for approaches to import substitution. An example of a current trend in poultry farming is the use of domestic veterinary drugs of natural origin, which include probiotic feed additives containing cultures of live lactic acid microorganisms, typical representatives of which are enterococci. A wide search for bio-technologically valuable microorganisms among representatives of the genus Enterococcus allowed us to isolate and characterize the Enterococcus faecium ICIS 96 strain, which is promising for creating a probiotic feed additive. It is known from the literature that lactic acid microorganisms are able to regulate the metabolism of poultry. It is appropriate to assume that the culture of E. faecium ICIS 96, when introduced into the diet of poultry, can have a beneficial effect on energy metabolism. Clarification of this assumption determined the purpose of our work.

The article studies the effect of different probiotics on the concentration of heavy metals in the muscle tissue of broiler chickens amid hypotrophy and their correction with probiotics. The experiment was conducted on broiler chickens of Smena 7 cross at ZAO “Orenburg Broiler” of the Orenburg region. The feeding and maintenance of broiler chickens were the same. The feeding ration comprised complete compound feed. The difference was as follows: hypotrophic experimental groups additionally included probiotics Vetom 1.1 at a dose of 6 g/kg feed and Lactobifadol at a dose of 1.2 g/kg feed in the main diet starting from one day of age to 42 days of age. The results obtained enable to determine that the probiotics used have a significant effect on the chemical parameters of broiler chicken meat particularly amid hypotrophy. It has been established that probiotics reduce the concentration of toxic elements in muscle tissue. It has also been proven that these probiotics do not significantly affect the content of heavy metals in the muscle tissue of broiler chickens.