Recipient Organization
UNIV OF PENNSYLVANIA
(N/A)
PHILADELPHIA,PA 19104
Performing Department
CLINICAL STUDIES
Non Technical Summary
This study of the gut microbiome in sows promises many novel avenues. It is the first detailed description of the gut microbiome in the adult pig. This would open the door for additional research on how the gut microbiome could interact with a variety of economically important physiological functions of the sow such as nutrient utilization and reproductive efficiency. Furthermore, describing the impact of gestational stage on the gut microbiome is a necessary precursor for the study of any other aspect of the pregnant sow. It has been suggested that an animal's microbiome co-evolved to need the meets of both the micro-organism and its host. We are curious to see if changes in diversity could provide additional functionality that might make individual animals more capable to cope with environmental stressors.
Animal Health Component
100%
Research Effort Categories
Basic
(N/A)
Applied
100%
Developmental
(N/A)
Goals / Objectives
The overarching objective of this work is to test the hypothesis that the diversity of sow gut microbiome is responsive to physical and psychological stressors in the animal's environment and could be used as a novel indicator of farm animal health and welfare. Work in laboratory animal species suggests that gut microbiome diversity is sensitive to stress and animals experiencing stress often suffer from either poor health, welfare or both. Growing public concern about farm animal welfare has yielded both legislative and market initiatives to reform many current husbandry practices for chickens, pigs and cows. Of particular concern is the gestation stall, a 2 x 7 foot individual animal enclosure where mother pigs spend the entirety of their 4 month pregnancy. It allows the farmer the ability to provide both individual animal nutrition and care to the mother sow, but precludes her from performing many natural behaviors including turning around. The gestation stall has been banned from use in the European Union and 9 states in the US. Over 60 national branded companies in the US have called for pork sourced from farms using gestation stalls to be eliminated from their supply chains. The scientific evidence, however, is equivocal with regard whether the welfare of individual sows is really improved in alternatives to the gestation stall. Animals gain the ability to perform natural behaviors but when in groups are at greater risk for malnutrition and aggression that can lead to injury. However, there is very little information available about the health and welfare of animals in these types of alternative housing systems as well as what might be predictive of productivity. Whenever pigs are grouped together, even from birth, a social hierarchy is established. We are proposing to study the impact of social status of the health and welfare of gestating sows using the sow microbiome. These animals are reared in one type of group housing where the sows are feed via an electronic sow feeder (ESF). In this system, the feeder reads an RFID tag in their ear and dispenses an amount of feed determined based on the computer settings for that unique animal. The ESF station operates as a one way, pass-through feeder that generates a daily log of the time of day that each sow enters the feeder and consumes her ration. This information can be used to identify the rank or order in which sows feed at the station each day. This feed order is stable over time and is correlated with sow parity and weight as well as dominance rank. Taken together, these findings suggest that feed order is likely one measure of the social structure of the pen, with more aggressive and older sows eating earlier than younger, low ranking sows. Furthermore, animals lower in the social hierarchy are more likely to suffer from injury and lameness. Thus feed order provides a convenient experimental tool to probe novel indicators of animal health and welfare. Little is known about the gut microbiome of the sow. While much work has been carried out on the gut microbiome of swine, all of this work has focused on the growing pig to examine the impact of feeding growth promoting antibiotics. Pigs raised for meat consumption are slaughtered at about 6 months of age and therefore the swine gut microbiome work has been carried out on this age animal or younger. In contrast, a breeding animal enters the herd around 8 months of age and will have her first litter by 1 year of age. These animals are the focus of our study. Many factors are recognized to impact the diversity of the gut microbiome including diet and age of the animals. All animals in our herd are fed an identical diet and thus this factor is controlled. We will repeatedly sample a subset of the same animals over the course of a year to 1 - Study how stable the sow gut microbiome diversity is in individual animals over time
Project Methods
We propose to utilize the sow herd at New Bolton Center which is 130 gestating sows fed once daily via ESF. The ESF generates a daily feed log which in turn generates a feed rank order for each sow. Feed rank serves as a measure of the sow's social rank in the pen. All sows are fed the same diet in different amounts depending on their body condition and stage of gestation. We would collect fecal samples on a subset of sows with a low feed rank (eat earlier in the day), with a medium feed rank (eat in the middle of the day) and sows with a high feed rank (eat later in the day). Sows would also receive body condition scores, lameness scores and lesion scores at the time of sample collection. These samples will be collected at three different times during gestation (early, middle, and late) and the study replicated thrice. The replicates are chosen to coincide with the normal production cycle of a sow such that we can track over three pregnancies the gut microbiome diversity from a subset of specific animals. This group will be identified at the onset of the study independent of their social status and tracked separately. Ten animals will be sampled for each of 4 treatment groups (high, medium, low social status and sows entering the ESF system. This will allow for maximum utilization of the sequencing chip and thus minimize our per animal costs.Metagenomic sequencing techniques will be employed to determine the phylogenetic diversity of the sow gut. Fecal samples will be processed for genomic analysis. The genomic DNA will be extracted from the samples using PSP stoolmini kit (Invitek) and amplified for V1-V2 region of the 16S rDNA gene using BSF8: 5'-AGAGTTTGATCCTGGCTCAG-3' and BSR357: 5'-CTGCTGCCTYCCGTA-3' primer pair. The PCR amplicon libraries will be sequenced on Ion-Torrent platform at the DNA Sequencing Facility at the Perelman School of Medicine, Upenn. Data analysis using QIIME and MOTHUR and validation of results using SAS and R packages will be performed.