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ARS Home » Southeast Area » Athens, Georgia » U.S. National Poultry Research Center » Poultry Microbiological Safety and Processing Research Unit » Research » Publications at this Location » Publication #361757
Title: Using sole-carbon-source usage profiles to A analyze cecal bacterial community of broiler chickens

Author
item Yeh, Hung-Yueh
item Line, John
item Hinton Jr, Arthur

Submitted to: American Society for Microbiology Meeting
Publication Type: Abstract Only
Publication Acceptance Date: 2/28/2019
Publication Date: N/A
Citation: N/A

Interpretive Summary: n/a

Technical Abstract: Background: It is well established that gut microbiota has the important effects on broiler nutrition, growth and immunological development. Due to the progress in nucleotide sequencing technology and bioinformatic algorithms, broiler cecal bacterial communities have been extensively investigated at the taxonomic levels. However, the functional diversity and metabolic activity of broiler cecal bacterial communities are not fully explored. Carbon is an essential element for bacterial growth. Thus, the patterns of carbon utilization from various carbon sources have been applied to characterize bacterial communities from various environments. One such approach is to use EcoPlates™ to assess physiological profiling at the bacterial community level. In this study, we applied these plates to profile cecal bacterial communities in broiler chickens. Methods: The caeca were aseptically excised from six-week-old broilers. The cecal contents were diluted in phosphate buffered saline, and were delivered in 96-well EcoPlates. The plates were then incubated at 42 oC for 120 hours in an OmniLog system. Responses of the bacterial communities to various carbon sources were measured on formazin production. The Growthcurver and Gompertz packages in R and GraphPad Prism 7 were used for statistical analyses. Results: The sigmoidal growth curves with three phases were observed in all cecal samples. Broiler cecal bacterial communities could not use 11 chemicals for carbon sources; instead, they used pyruvic acid methyl ester, glycogen, glucose-1-phosphate and N-acetyl-D-glucosamine most frequently. Each bacterial community metabolized various numbers of the substrates at different rates among broilers. Conclusion: In summary, the functional profiling of broiler cecal bacterial communities was assessed by carbon sources with EcoPlates. These results provide insight of the potential heterotrophic bacterial community in broiler caeca, and a rationale for further evaluation of this technique to assess microbial community characteristics leading to improving management in poultry production.