Project Number: 1245-32000-097-10
Project Type: Grant

Start Date: Mar 01, 2011
End Date: Feb 28, 2014

Objective:
Maintaining gut microbiota in developing chickens is critical for animal health. Gut microbiota plays an important role in innate immunity and disruption in gut normal flora during infectious diseases needs to be better studied in order to understand host-pathogen interaction in necrotic enteritis. Cooperators will access gut microbiota in the intestinal samples which will be collected from experimental disease models developed at ARS.

Approach:
Reliable disease models for necrotic enteritis will be developed. Intestinal samples from various parts of the chicken intestine will be collected at different time points following the disease challenge by using an established necrotic enteritis disease model. DNA samples will be prepared and sent to the Cooperator for gut microbiota analysis using pyrosequencing.