Broiler chickens and early life programming: Microbiome transplant-induced cecal community dynamics and phenotypic effects

Abstract

The concept of successional trajectories describes how small differences in initial community composition can magnify through time and lead to significant differences in mature communities. For many animals, the types and sources of early-life exposures to microbes have been shown to have significant and long-lasting effects on the community structure and/or function of the microbiome. In modern commercial poultry production, chicks are reared as a single age cohort and do not directly encounter adult birds. This scenario is likely to initiate a trajectory of microbial community development that is significantly different than non-industrial settings where chicks are exposed to a much broader range of environmental and fecal inocula; however, the comparative effects of these two scenarios on microbiome development and function remain largely unknown. In this work, we performed serial transfers of cecal material through multiple generations of birds to first determine if serial transfers exploiting the ceca in vivo, rather than the external environment or artificial incubations, can produce a stable microbial community. Subsequently, we compared microbiome development between chicks receiving this passaged, i.e. host-selected, cecal material orally, versus an environmental inoculum, to test the hypothesis that the first exposure of newly hatched chicks to microbes determines early GI microbiome structure and may have longer-lasting effects on bird health and development. Cecal microbiome dynamics and bird weights were tracked for a two-week period, with half of the birds in each treatment group exposed to a pathogen challenge at 7 days of age. We report that: i) a relatively stable community was derived after a single passage of transplanted cecal material, ii) this cecal inoculum significantly but ephemerally altered community structure relative to the environmental inoculum and PBS controls, and iii) either microbiome transplant administered at day-of-hatch appeared to have some protective effects against pathogen challenge relative to uninoculated controls. Differentially abundant taxa identified across treatment types may inform future studies aimed at identifying strains associated with beneficial phenotypes.

Managing Gut Microbiota through In Ovo Nutrition Influences Early-Life Programming in Broiler Chickens

“…Unlike mammalian embryos, avian embryos have limited nutrients and energy for growth and development coming from the broiler breeder hen [ 6 ]. The term “early-life programming” refers to the way in which environmental factors, including nutrition, alter the course of fetal development, resulting in enduring modifications in the structure and function of biological systems [ 7 , 8 , 9 , 10 ].…”

Spotlight on the avian gut microbiome: fresh opportunities in discovery

“…Prebiotics (hard-to-digest carbohydrates) and probiotics (mono-or mixed microbial cultures) provide natural alternatives to antibiotics as growth promoters and have seen remarkable commercial uptake over recent years (Al-Khalaifa et al, 2019;Krysiak et al, 2021). When delivered to the host at key developmental stages, these products indirectly or directly modulate the gut microbiota and significantly influence the trajectory of successional development (Kabir, 2009;Ramírez et al, 2020). While no standardized commercial probiotic formulation exists, lactic acid bacteria (e.g.…”

“…Drawing on longstanding use of microbiota transplantation in chickens and other livestock, together with its recent success in human medicine for C. difficile infection (Bakken et al, 2011), development of approaches to storing and delivering a standardized gut microbiota promises to be a hot topic in poultry microbiome research (Ramírez et al, 2020).…”

Twentieth Century Dogmas Prevent Sustainable Healthcare

“…[ [84][85][86][87][88][89][90][91][92] Much of the new data and scientific evidence resulting in new dogmas stems from the explosion of research into the microbiome [5], and the recognition that the microbiome plays a huge role in determining human [6][7][8][9], as well as animal [10][11][12][13][14] and plant health [15][16][17]. Earth is fundamentally a microbial planet [18,19], and most complex organisms on earth have microbiome co-partners that contribute to a spaceship earth concept in which the interlinked microbiome contributes to health vs. disease [20,21].…”