Professor Robert Moore

Despite extensive research on reduced protein (RP) diets in broiler chickens, the consequences of such practices for gut health and barrier function are not well defined. This study was conducted to investigate the effect of reduced protein and the source of protein. The control normal protein level diets had either meat and bone meal (MBM) or an all-vegetable diet (VEG). Accordingly, four diets w ...

I. INTRODUCTIONSpotty Liver Disease (SLD) is characterised by increased mortality, particularly around the time of peak egg production, the occurrence of multiple grey/white lesions in the liver, and reduction in egg output. It is caused by Campylobacter hepaticus (Van et al., 2016), which responds to therapeutic antibiotics, although resistance has been reported (Grimes and Reece, 2011). In this ...

I. INTRODUCTIONOregano essential oil contains many compounds, of which carvacrol, thymol and their precursors are the major components, accounting for approximately 80% of the contents. Carvacrol and thymol have been shown to actively disrupt the cell membranes of bacteria leading to cell death, promoting the use of oregano as a phytobiotic (Rao et al., 2010). Phytoadditives such as oregano are be ...

I. INTRODUCTIONThroughout the world, poultry are a major and growing source of high-quality protein, as they outperform all other terrestrial meat production systems in water, feed, carbon, and land use efficiency. A challenge for intensive production systems has been the potential to introduce high pathogen loads and stresses on the animals. Such challenges have traditionally been managed with th ...

I. INTRODUCTIONCampylobacter hepaticus currently causes significant economic losses to the poultry industry, as it is the cause of spotty liver disease (SLD) in chickens (Van et al., 2016, 2017a). The clinical manifestations of SLD include the formation of gray/white lesions in the liver, an increase in mortality rate in a flock, and reduction in egg production. It has been sporadically reported o ...

I. INTRODUCTION The recent major drop in the cost of DNA sequencing, combined with advances in the annotation of 16S rRNA gene microbial databases and analysis tools, have all contributed to the “golden age of microbial ecology” (Oakley et al., 2014). Poultry researchers have leveraged and applied these advances to define approaches that may be taken to manipulate microbiota to improv ...

Pore-forming toxins (PFTs) are a diverse group of cytolytic proteins that are produced by many different organisms (1, 2). Bacterial PFTs are important virulence factors (1) and in general are produced as soluble precursors that bind to the host cell membrane and assemble as oligomers that subsequently form transmembrane pores (3, 4).PFTs can be divided into two classes depending on whether the po ...