Work needed on probiotics

Probiotics for gut health in humans is now commonplace, but a group of CQUniversity agriculture researchers say the impact of intestinal health on livestock production is still relatively misunderstood despite recent technological advances.

CQUniversity’s Molecular Microbiology and Animal Health team, led by Professor Dana Stanley, collaborated with researchers from CQUniversity’s Precision Livestock Management team to examine the complexities of intestinal microbiota health and found significant knowledge gaps still remain.

Their conclusions, published in the international journal Animal Production Science, were presented by Professor Stanley at the Australian Association of Animal Sciences Conference in Cairns in early July.

In the paper, CQUniversity’s animal health experts presented the good and the bad of the amplicon sequencing methodology, pointing at a number of issues with the methodology and common errors in data interpretation that may cloud the true state of these microbial communities.

It said microbiota was widely recognised as an important part of animal health, but a shortage of bioinformatics and data interpretation skills often led to livestock microbiota research lagging behind the general knowledge base.

“Misinformation, misinterpretation and the overstating of outcomes and consequences of microbiota results occur regularly in published scientific literature,” the research team said.

It said many of the challenges of microbiome science related to the high variability of microbiota between individual animals, as well as between breeds, and how quickly it could change due to alterations in health, feed or environmental factors.

It also noted more attention should also be given to the choice in methodologies for gathering microbiota data from livestock animals.

“Faecal samples will tell a very different story from samples collected from areas inside the animal such as the caecum, duodenum or rumen,” the paper said.

Despite the shortfalls, the CQUniversity team said microbiome research was far from slowing down and the focus was now shifting from productivity increases to application in the animal welfare domain.