The swine gut microbiome is a complex environment of microbial communities living in the intestinal tract and serves as an excellent biomedical model for human disease. However, little was known about how to isolate and culture the swine gut microbiota, an important part of understanding the role of the microbiome in swine production, before animal scientists at the Arkansas Agricultural Experiment Station began a comprehensive investigation.
Aiming research at improving the animals’ health, Arkansas Agricultural Experiment Station scientist Jingchao Zhao and post-doctoral researcher Xiaofan Wang utilized next-generation DNA sequencing of fecal samples to attain a highly detailed description of the bacterial environment of swine guts.
Researchers then worked to determine which bacteria provided health benefits and which were potentially disease-causing.
“The individual species of microbiota had to be separated and multiplied, then fed back to the pigs to see which had benefits and which might make them sick,” says an Arkansas Agricultural Experiment Station article. “Their goal was to correlate specific bacteria to feed efficiency —or how well pigs turn food into muscle.”
In order to accomplish these goals, the team developed new methodologies for isolating individual bacteria and culturing them. After employing 53 bacterial cultivation methods using different combination of growth media and gases, the team was able to find more previously undetected bacteria, even beyond the new species found using next generation sequencing, the article explains. Along with identifying more bacteria than previously known, they found many core bacterial species that are essential for swine health from birth and throughout the animals’ lives.
Additionally, three of the bacteria strains isolated through research and fed back to pigs were found to significantly improve pig health and feed efficiency. Through culturing to expand each bacterium, the strains were then used to develop probiotic products and live bacteria beneficial to the animals. Probiotics can reduce reliance on antibiotics to protect animal health, Zhao adds.
“Probiotics improve swine health and performance, benefit the animals and agriculture, and help feed the world,” Zhao says in a University of Arkansas press release. “The remarkable progress in swine gut microbiome and big data analysis have revealed many potential probiotics that are positively correlated with growth performance. However, we can’t call them probiotics until we are able to culture them and prove their beneficial effects.
Following the comprehensive research, the University of Arkansas System Division of Agriculture patented Zhao’s process and products were subsequently licensed to Kent Nutrition Group, Inc., a member of the Kent Corporation family of businesses, that will market them globally.
“We’ve developed a roadmap to culture a huge variety of bacteria, including these potential probiotics, from pigs,” Zhao says. “This is the first step to develop novel, next-generation probiotics that improve health and growth performance of pigs.”
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