Intestinal bacterial composition in laying pullet reared in tropical climate received betaine supplementation

Abstract

Abstract Intestinal bacterial composition is one of the markers that can be observed in poultry under heat-stress conditions. This study evaluated the effects of dietary betaine on the intestinal bacterial composition of growing pullets reared in a tropical climate. The ninety-six Lohmann laying hens aged three weeks old were distributed into two dietary groups, each comprising six replicates of eight birds. This experiment used PAR-DOC (Japfa Comfeed ©) as basal diet (T0) and basal diet with 1.2g/kg betaine supplementation (T1). The next-generation sequencing method of the 16S rRNA gene region V3–V4 was applied to explore the taxonomy profile. Bacteria from the genus Faecalibacterium, Akkermansia, Desulfovibrio, and Lachnospiraceae UCG-002 were reported as markers in the heat stress condition. A t-test was applied using R software to evaluate the effect of each treatment. The relative abundance from the genus Akkermansia as a marker heat stress response in T1 treatment showed significantly lower than T0 (p<0.05). Based on this result, we concluded that the lower population of the genus Akkermansia indicated that betaine supplementation could alleviate heat stress conditions in growing pullets.