4th Animal Gut Health & Nutrition Summit 2021

Jennifer Radosevich, Worldwide Director, Research Hill’s Pet Nutrition

• Exploring how to take bioinformatic data and extract meaningful insights from it

• Outlining the advantages that using metagenomics has over alternative methods

Shaimaa Ahmed, Product Manager Diversigen

• The lack of complete animal-specific databases for microbiome studies has limited our understanding of the animal microbiome

• Diversigen has developed MetaGene™ Mouse, a mouse-specific shotgun metagenomic sequencing pipeline and a mouse-specific microbiome database that significantly improve the detection and identification of bacterial species and strains unique to mice, outperforming publically available databases

• MetaGene™ Mouse increases the overall median mapping rate from 12% to 45%. Furthermore, it increases the understanding of the microbiome function thanks to a 5-fold increase in functional mapping rate based on our mouse-specific database.

• The approach we took with the mouse microbiome can be applied to any animal species, including companion, and production, to facilitate a better understanding of each animal’s unique microbiome

Emmanuelle Apper, Global R&D Manager Centers of Excellence Lallemand

• Microbiome, performance, health and sustainability, our current challenges

• From correlations to causation: how OMICs methods can help?

• A lot of promises but also still a lot of challenges

Holly Ganz, CSO AnimalBiome

• Defining the core healthy microbiome provides an important frame of reference that is useful for feed and supplement formulators as well as veterinary medicine

• Diet is a major factor influencing the composition of bacteria in the gut microbiome, and nutrition studies show that members of the core microbiome in healthy dogs and cats respond in a predictable manner to dietary changes

• Microbiome testing is useful as a research tool for designing new products that support and promote a healthy gut microbiome

Matt Koci, Professor North Carolina State University

• Microbiome, metabolomic, and RNAseq data is great for giving a broad survey of what is going on in the gut at a particular time

• These approaches rarely point to one clear pathway driving host health

• The goal is using the different omics tools to identify core pathways, ranking them for functional characterization

Vadim Bellinson, AgBiome

• Diverse and characterized microbial library

• Specific and relevant bioassays

• Bioinformatics tools

Chris Belnap, CEO Resilient Biotics

• Methods and laboratory models for understanding microbiome community function

• Key data that can help drive in vitro model development and speed product discovery & validation

• Are these models and predictive methods reliable? Can we accurately re-create microbiome interactions in the lab? 

Peter Ferket, Director, Distinguished Professor of Poultry Science, Nutrition, and Biotechnology North Carolina State University

• This presentation will discuss how to cultivate gut health by understanding the fundamentals of ecology and enteric development, particularly during the early growth phase, including 1) the ecological environment, 2) nutrient substrate balance and 3) symbiotic microflora stability

• Evidence will be presented that perinatal nutritional manipulation by in ovo feeding not only enhances early enteric development, but also the development of pioneer colonizers that are important for a sustained and stable microbiome

• Management and dietary treatments during the neonatal period will be presented that further benefits the development of the gut microbiome and gut health and resist the proliferation of enteric pathogens

Marcos Rostagno, Director, Technical & Regulatory Services Phytobiotics North America LLC; Padmakumar Pillai, Senior Advisor, R&D Scientific & Regulatory Affairs Cargill

• How do you choose your path?

• What are the pros and cons of each of the regulatory approaches (GRAS, Self GRAS, New Ingredient, FDA)

• Discussion around claims, and what data is required to support this

• What are the challenges in working with the FDA?

• Can feeds be re-positioned to therapeutics?

Xandra Smith, Research Manager Arm and Hammer Animal Feed and Food Production

• The early colonizing bacteria affect succession of the gut microbiota and impact subsequent performance

• Probiotics fed to young livestock could impact microbial succession and improve health parameters

• Studies were performed to determine the microbial succession along the gastrointestinal tract of chicks, poults, weanling pigs and calves fed Bacillus-based probiotics