NIRS of body and tissues in growing rabbits fed diets with different fat sources and supplemented with Curcuma longa

Abstract

A portable Near Infrared Reflectance Spectroscopy (NIRS) instrument was applied to 40 growing rabbits to determine body and tissue differences induced by experimental factors. The rabbits were examined at 2 live sites, in 7 warm carcass tissues and in longissimus dorsi muscle samples prepared in ethanol. For this purpose, the method was applied in a bi-factorial experiment concerning the dietary oil source (O) (maize vs. palm oil) and Curcuma longa (C) supplementation (0 and 3 g/kg, respectively). Significant chemical differences emerged for palmitic, oleic and linoleic acids in the longissimus dorsi muscle due to the O factor and for linolenic acid due to the C factor. The NIRS spectra and chemical analyses were elaborated by the Partial Least Squares (PLS) method, and the rsquares in cross-validation (R 2 cv) were retained as measure of the unoriented differentiation between the levels of the planned factor for each landmark and fatty acid (FA) profile. Multivariate PLS analysis of the FA muscular fat showed that the O factor induced strong differentiation (R 2 cv: 0.96), while less influence (0.33) was observed for the C factor. The model based on the NIRS radiation of the landmarks clearly shows the O factor effects, not only in the perirenal (0.90) and scapular (0.85) fats, but also in the belly (0.76), liver (0.73) and hind legs (0.72). Whereas the C effects were only expressed in the live animals (ears: 0.66 and abdominal wall: 0.58) and in post-mortem (liver: 0.60). It was concluded that a preliminary NIRS scan of the carcass and of live rabbits can point out the presence of intrinsic experimental effects concerning the lipid metabolism of polyunsaturated FA of the n-6 series (O factor) and n-3 series (C factor).

Smart NIR Tomoscopy to Predict Oxidative Stress in Rabbits

“…Some years ago, Peiretti et al [21] concluded a study on NIRS of body and tissues in growing rabbits fed diets with different fat sources and supplemented with Curcuma longa with the phrase "New portable NIRS devices could be profitably used to test discriminant dietary effects on rabbit meat". Availability of a totally new instrument, the NIR-SCÏO smart, cheap and complete, enabled us to reach the far shore.…”

“…NIRS has been classically used in rabbit research to predict the nutritional parameters of feedstuffs [10,11] and the composition of hind-leg meat [12,13], to determine the intramuscular fat content in rabbit selection programs [14], and the composition of the fatty acids (FA) related to an organic production system [15]. A discriminating approach has been adopted in the experimental use of NIRS to ascertain technological or nutritional factors [16][17][18][19][20][21].…”

The Application of NIRS to Determine Animal Physiological Traits for Wildlife Management and Conservation

“…Recently, NIRS has demonstrated the potential to detect biophysical traits from animal excrement, saliva, and tissue samples that may be useful for a number of applications in wildlife management and conservation [31]. These include disease and parasite status [32,33], sex [10,34], species [35], age class [10,36], reproductive status [10,[37][38][39], stress levels [40,41], body composition [42,43], and nutritional state [44]. The development of portable field sensors and lower-cost NIRS instruments, particularly in comparison with the equipment required for conventional assays, is increasing interest in a wide range of ecological applications [31,45,46].…”