Relationship between intestinal microbiota composition and growth performance in piglets : Further datamining on studies in piglets carried out within the framework of the Public Private Partnership Feed4Foodure

This research was focused on investigating the relationship between the intestinal microbiota composition in individual piglets and their growth performance, indicated by their increase in body weight relative to their body weight on a previous time-point. The age varied between 1 day old piglets to 63 days old piglets (approximately 9 weeks). In this research we used multiple microbiota datasets acquired from four animal experiments. Because in these studies most data were available for the microbiota composition in the jejunum, growth performance data were related to the composition in this intestinal segment. The study showed a large variation in the jejunal microbiota composition within and between the animal experiments involved. Despite the large diversity in sampling time of the samples collected and the relatively low number of animals of which data were available, the data were employed to investigate whether potential relationships between the microbiota genus composition in jejunum and the relative body weight gain could be detected, using data on individual piglets. In the trials evaluated, significant microbiota signatures could be identified that correlated to the performance parameter(s), here relative body weight gain, however no bacterial group was consistently associated to this performance parameter. Data mining efforts showed that size of the dataset (number of animals involved) is critical to identify relationships between the microbiota composition and growth performance. In our attempt, we merged two animal experiments of a similar experimental design to increase the number of animals. The strongest explanatory variable for the variation in the jejunal microbiota composition was the experiment rather than e.g. the time-point of sampling (age of the pig), implying that combining these small intestinal microbiota data of different experiments to increase the number of animals for the discovery of microbiota signatures correlated to the weight gain parameters was not effective for pigs. Future research aiming to detect legitimate microbiota signatures that correlate with zootechnical performance parameters will require experiments in which substantially higher number of pigs are used, which is echoing the conclusions reached by various scientists that search for disease or other phenotype associated microbiota signatures in the human population. Another improvement in future approaches could be to focus on faecal rather than jejunal microbiota, which is more practically feasible, especially when the number of animals has to be drastically increased. However, we have to make sure that we account for dietary composition and the potential effect of ingredients on the fermentable fraction reaching the hindgut. Additionally, determination of the microbiota functional blueprint by shotgun metagenome sequencing rather than its species composition analysis is able to decipher complex interactions that occur in the gut in more detail, again, an approach that was shown to be fruitful in human microbiota research in health and disease.

Bibliographic Details

Main Authors:	Schokker, Dirkjan, Jansman, Alfons, Kleerebezem, Michiel, Wolvekamp, Monique
Format:	External research report biblioteca
Language:	English
Published:	Wageningen Livestock Research
Subjects:	Life Science,
Online Access:	https://research.wur.nl/en/publications/relationship-between-intestinal-microbiota-composition-and-growth
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