Poultry Feed Innovation Research Team from the Institute of Feed Research of Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences made an important breakthrough on the mechanism of growth inhibition in broilers chickens challenged by immune stress. It provides a new perspective for further understanding the mechanism of effects on the broiler chickens induced by immune stress. Relevant results were published in Journal of Animal Science and Biotechnology.

According to Dr. Zheng Aijuan, chickens in the intensive farming often suffer from many stress challenges, such as environmental stress, vaccination and so on, which could stimulate the immune system and lead to immune activation and immune stress. Long term immune stress leads to the decrease of feed intake and growth inhibition in the broilers, resulting in the economic losses of breeding industry. At present, the nutritional regulation can alleviate the damages by supplementing selenium, vitamin E, sodium butyrate, vitamin C, α- Tocopherol succinate and antimicrobial peptides into the broilers diet, but the effect is not ideal. The reason why the molecular mechanism of immune stress affecting the growth of broilers is not clear. Our previous studies indicated, due to the immune stress, the energy metabolism and muscle contraction related to protein expression in the broilers muscle changed, the muscle fiber area increased, and the muscle cells water holding capacity reduced, eventually resulting in the low meat quality. This study reveals that broilers can deal with the adverse effects of immune stress by up-regulating the expression of defense function, wound repair, amino acid catabolism and hormone secretion related proteins in the liver. It was found that immune stress could reduce the secretion of growth hormone and insulin-like growth factor by promoting the degradation of branched chain amino acids, thereby reducing the muscle anabolism and inhibiting the growth of broilers chickens. The results of this study provide an important theoretical basis for alleviating immune injury in broiler production by new nutritional regulation.

The research was sponsored by the National Natural Science Foundation of China.

https://jasbsci.biomedcentral.com/track/pdf/10.1186/s40104-021-00591-1.pdf

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By Zheng Aijuan (zhengaijuan@caas.cn)