The intestinal tract contains millions of
bacteria, both good and bad ones. Despite the growing interest in gut microbes,
knowledge of the intestinal microbiota is very limited. According ot Finnish
researchers a better understanding of the microbiota composition is a
prerequisite for future gut health research.
Supplementing livestock with probiotics or
yeast can be very beneficial, but how do you know whether these live bacteria
reach the digestive tract alive? Sylvie van Zandycke and Chris Powell use PCR
techniques that can answer this question within five hours.
Probiotics are widely used in aquaculture to combat water-borne
bacterial diseases. Researchers at Lallemand Animal Nutrition have
recently discovered that the proportion of a probiotic that is ingested
also confers benefits on both growth performances and survival of
aquatic species.
If you feed probiotic bacteria continuously, clearly there is no need to feed it
as well. However, when a specific strain of enterococcus is fed with a
pre-biotic specially chosen to feed the indigenous microflora- the result is a
truly synergistic effect for claves and piglets.
Probiotics may provide an alternative way to reduce the use of antibiotics in
aquaculture and simultaneously may avoid the development of antibiotics
resistant bacteria.
Although ruminants are particularly well adapted for feed digestion, owing to
their ruminal microflora, at times, biochemical conditions prevailing in the
rumen can prevent optimum feed utilization.