Peter Brooks

I agree with you. Sadly EU legislators did not. Certainly there are some soils that can benefit from the addition of high Cu effluent, but many do not and don't sequester enough copper. However, the big concern is/was that run off could be extremely damaging to watercourses. Clearly this is more of an issue in areas with high rainfall and/or a high water table. Unfortunately, legislators are unwil ...

I recall the 'good old days' when we were permitted to use CuSO4 as a 'growth promoter' in pigs. That was before EU legislation prohibited its use because of the potential for adverse environmental effects from the resultant effluent. In my lab, we showed that Cu modulates the antimicrobial effects of organic acids.Beal, J. D., Niven, S. J., Campbell, A. and Brooks, P. H. 2003. The effect of coppe ...

Christoph Hutter Let me have an e-mail address

Christopher Hettiarachchi If you want a copy of the peer reviewed paper please e-mail me and I will send you a copy.

harish murty I am do not have experience with S,boulardii as I have not worked with it. Yes it is a yeast; but some yeast have probiotic properties. Other yeasts can be a real problem in diets, particularly moist or liquid diets. If you do a literature search there are review articles (relating to humans) listing the mechanisms by which S.boulardii might be beneficial in enteric conditions.

Christopher Hettiarachchi The aim was to produce an approach that was antibiotic free. In our work with pigs we found that fermented feed was an effective substitute for antibiotic supplemented diets. By that I mean that the effect of fermented feed on the gut flora was similar to that of growth promoting antibiotics, namely to shift the lactic acid bacteria to coliform ratio in the direction of ...

harish murty The simple answer to your question is that I do not know which would work better as we never compared the two approaches in an experiment. However, we can say that they are very different approaches. S. boulardii has been studies as a potential probiotic, fed either live or dead in solid feed. Our approach was to ferment the feed and hence change the nature of the food itself. Fer ...

The problem with fermenting the complete diet is that if it contains crystalline lysine some or all of this may be lost during the initial stage of fermentation. Enterobacteriaceae have been shown to decarboxylate free amino acids such as lysine and arginine and these organisms proliferate in the fermentation initially before the LAB dominate the fermentation. See our paper Niven SJ, Beal JD, Br ...