/PoultryMicrobiome

Microbiome and Performance analysis

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Poultry Microbiome

The poultry industry is evolving towards antibiotic-free production to meet market demands and decelerate the increasing spread of the antimicrobial resistance. The growing trend of antibiotic free products have challenged producers to decrease or completely stop using antimicrobial supplementation in broiler chicken diets to improve feed efficiency, growth rate, and intestinal health. Natural feed additives (e.g., probiotics and phytobiotics) are promising products to act as a substitute for antimicrobial growth promoters.

We hypothesized: (1) supplementing broiler chickens' diet with a Probiotic, or an Essential Oil blend positively affected growth performance, and (2) These dietary supplements shaped broilers’ fecal microbiota enabling the identification of specific taxa potentially responsible for the phenotypic differences between the treatment groups. The objectives of this study were to compare the effects of a commercially available Probiotic and an Essential Oils-based feed additive to understand how these products impact production outcomes and to describe and evaluate the fecal microbiome diversity and composition of chickens’ fed Probiotic and Essential Oils blend additives available in the poultry industry.

16S rRNA Analysis of Microbiome Performance Analysis