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ARS Home » Southeast Area » Fayetteville, Arkansas » Poultry Production and Product Safety Research » Research » Publications at this Location » Publication #331461
Research Project: Antibiotic Alternatives for Controlling Foodborne Pathogens and Disease in Poultry

Location: Poultry Production and Product Safety Research

Title: Nutritional supplement of hatchery eggshell membrane improves poultry performance and provides resistance against endotoxin stress

Author
item MAKKAR, SARBJEET - University Of Arkansas
item Rath, Narayan
item PACKIALAKSHMI, BALAMURUGAN - University Of Arkansas
item ZHOU, ZUOYONG - Chongqing University
item HUFF, GERALDINE - Former ARS Employee
item Donoghue, Ann - Annie

Submitted to: PLOS ONE
Publication Type: Peer Reviewed Journal
Publication Acceptance Date: 7/15/2016
Publication Date: 7/27/2016
Citation: Makkar, S., Rath, N.C., Packialakshmi, B., Zhou, Z., Huff, G., Donoghue, A.M. 2016. Nutritional supplement of hatchery eggshell membrane improves poultry performance and provides resistance against endotoxin stress. PLoS One. 11(7). doi:10.1371.journal.pone.0159433.

Interpretive Summary: Eggshells are poultry hatchery waste which contain many proteins mostly in the form of membranes. We considered using these membranes as a feed supplement for chickens to investigate whether they affect their growth and disease resistance capabilities. Our results shows that supplementation of poultry feed with egg membranes can improve their resistance to bacterial product induced weight loss and reduce their stress levels.

Technical Abstract: Eggshells are significant part of hatchery waste which consist of calcium carbonate crust, membranes, and proteins and peptides of embryonic origins along with other entrapped contaminants including microbes. We hypothesized that using this product as a nutritional additive in poultry diet may confer better immunity to the chickens in the paradigm of mammalian milk that enhances immunity. Therefore, we investigated the effect of hatchery eggshell membranes (HESM) as a short term feed supplement on growth performance and immunity of chickens under bacterial lipopolysaccharide (LPS) challenged condition. Three studies were conducted to find the effect of HESM supplement on post hatch chickens. In the first study, the chickens were fed either a control diet or diets containing 0.5% whey protein or HESM as supplement and evaluated at 5 weeks of age using growth, hematology, clinical chemistry, plasma immunoglobulins, and corticosterone as variables. The second and third studies were done to compare the effects of LPS on control and HESM fed birds at 5 weeks of age following at 4 and 24 h of treatment where the HESM was also sterilized with ethanol to deplete bacterial factors. HESM supplement caused weight gain in 2 experiments and decreased blood corticosterone concentrations. While LPS caused a significant loss in body weight at 24 h following its administration, the HESM supplemented birds showed significantly less body weight loss compared with the control fed birds. The WBC, heterophil/lymphocyte ratio, and the levels of IgG were low in chickens fed diets with HESM supplement compared with control diet group. LPS challenge increased the expression of pro-inflammatory cytokine gene IL-6 but the HESM fed birds showed its effect curtailed, also, which also, favored the up-regulation of anti-inflammatory genes compared with control diet fed chickens. Post hatch supplementation of HESM appears to improve performance, modulate immunity, and increase resistance of chickens to endotoxin.