The effect of feeding a diet naturally contaminated with deoxynivalenol on production traits and selected biochemical indicators of broiler chickens

Good article about the effects of deoxynivalenol in broiler chickens. Actually, the weight gains were constantly higher, despite a wide margin of error, on DON-contaminated diet! This again confirms that broilers are not the main species suffering from DON. The same 1.5 mg/kg of feed of DON would be devastating on piglets and somewhat economically detrimental to milking cows. On broilers the real life farmer will not see the difference.

Re: Dennis Tranquil
Thank you for the comment, such level of DON (1.5 mg/kg feed) contamination did not cause measurable effect on proudction traits, but even at this level it may cause some effect on the biological defense system. For this reason in the case of deficiencies of antioxidants in the diet it may cause effect also on performance parameters.

Thanks Mézes for this nice contribution about the effects of deoxynivalenol in broiler chickens. It is a confirmation of previous investigations that you don't get any DON effect on growth parameters below 5 - 10 ppm. I would like to know your thoughts regarding native microflora of birds having DON detoxification capabilities and how DON absorbation is regulated by age at intestinal level? These points you mentioned in the last paragraph of your discussion.

Re: Olayinka
Thank you for the comment. DON tolerance of chicken (and most of the poultry species) is an unsolved problem. In the article we discuss about one of the potential background of that tolerance. We speculate that, as in all farm animals, gut microflora has potential to detoxify xenobiotics, such as DON, and the tolerance probably based on the different capacity of the microflora. Ageing has a measurable effect on that tolerance which may based on the development of gut microflora during that process (without any antimicrobial treatment, such as in our trial).
We hope that you agree with our speculation, and in the near future we try to continue this work together with microbiological examinations or in vitro studies with gut microflora from chicken.