Response of Broilers to Dietary Inclusions of Sugarcane Bagasse and Protease in a Reduced Crude Protein Diet

Gut health in Poultry.

1. The main factor that needs to be considered in the maintenance of poultry is the health management of the digestive tract.

2. The health of the digestive tract in chickens is very important to ensure their health and productivity.

3. Several factors that can affect the health of the digestive tract in chickens are feed, cage management, sanitation, and the environment.

4. Out of all the above factors nutrition / feed plays a very important role in maintaining gut health.

5. Gut health management has gained even more interest in last few years in poultry production due to increasing demands for economic efficiency, animal welfare, food safety, reduction in environmental impacts, and a ban on or avoidance of antibiotic growth promoters (AGPs) use (Morgan, 2017).

6. The common aspects affecting bird gut health are stress, exogenous infection, diet and water, etc.

7. Let us discuss about Protease enzyme.

Proteases:

8. Protease is an important factor in protein digestion as it hydrolyses the less digestible proteins in animal feeds and breaks them down into more usable peptides.

9. Improving dietary protein digestibility with a specific protease inclusion can reduce feed cost by allowing the use of lower crude protein feedstuffs with lesser quality amino acids, effectively lowering protein and digestible amino acids levels required from the feedstuffs up to 10%.

10. Unconventional protein sources, such as Rapeseed meal (RSM), sunflower cake, Guar meal, cotton seed meal (CSM) and Corn Distillers Dried Grains with Solubles (DDGS) etc due to nutrient variability can lower quality protein levels and reduce digestibility in poultry.

11. Supplementing exogenous protease enables poultry that lack adequate levels of endogenous enzymes to digest proteins in the diet, which reduces the flow of undigested protein and other anti-nutritional entering the large intestine.

12. Anti-nutritional factors impair smooth digestion such that significant quantities of undigested starch and/or protein enter the large intestine, stimulating the activity of putrefactive bacteria and pre-disposing the animal to intestinal disorders.

13. As already evident from the studies, the supplementation of exogenous enzymes will improve small intestine digestion and as a result limit substrate availability in the hindgut, therefore mitigating any potential GIT microbial dysfunction.

14. There is enormous scope to explore the effect of supplementation of enzyme combinations targeting feed composition on gut health and ultimately impacting growth and efficiency.

Dr V.Rajendra Prasad