Abstract
The study was to determine effects of dietary supplementation of chitosan (COS) and galacto-mannan-oligosaccharids (GMOS) on some serum biochemical indices, serum growth hormone (GH) and insulin-like growth factor-I (IGF-I) levels, and hepatic and long gissimus muscle IGF-I mRNA expression in early-weaned piglets. Twenty six Duroc × Landrace × Yorkshire piglets at the age of 15 days were used. The piglets had access to creep feed during the suckling. Six piglets were sacrificed for sampling at the beginning of the study. The other 20 piglets were individually housed in metabolic cages and randomly allotted to four corn and soybean meal-based diets including the control group, the antibiotic group with 110 mg lincomycin/kg diet, the COS group containing 0.025% COS, and the GMOS group with 0.20% GMOS, respectively, in a 2-week feeding experiment. Blood urea nitrogen (BUN) level was reduced whereas serum total protein concentration was increased (P < 0.05) in responses to the COS and GMOS supplementation. Dietary supplementation of COS and GMOS also increased (P < 0.05) the serum GH and IGF-I levels along with enhanced hepatic and the muscle IGF-I mRNA abundance. Dietary supplementation of oligosaccharides such as COS and GMOS may improve growth and feed conversion efficiency by increasing plasma GH and IGF-I levels, in the early-weaned piglets.
Original language | English (US) |
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Pages (from-to) | 430-441 |
Number of pages | 12 |
Journal | Domestic Animal Endocrinology |
Volume | 28 |
Issue number | 4 |
DOIs | |
State | Published - May 2005 |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information:This research was jointly supported by grants from the National Basic Research Program of China (contract/grant number: 2004CB117502), the National Science Foundation of China (contract/grant number: 30371038), the Chinese Academy of Sciences Knowledge Innovation Project (contract number: KSCX2-SW-323), the Chinese Academy of Sciences Hundred Talents Project (2003–2006) and K.C. Wong Education Foundation Hong Kong.
Keywords
- Early-weaned piglets
- Growth hormone
- Insulin-like growth factor-I
- Oligosaccharides
- mRNA expression level