Dose‐dependent effects of dietary zinc oxide on bacterial communities and metabolic profiles in the ileum of weaned pigs
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Pharmacological levels of zinc oxide (ZnO) can improve the health of weaning piglets and influence the intestinal microbiota. This experiment aimed at studying the dose-response effect of five dietary concentrations of ZnO on small intestinal bacteria and metabolite profiles. Fifteen piglets, weaned at 25 ± 1 days of age, were allocated into five groups according to body weight and litter. Diets were formulated to contain 50 (basal diet), 150, 250, 1000 and 2500 mg zinc/kg by adding analytical-grade (>98% purity) ZnO to the basal diet and fed ad libitum for 14 days after a 7-day adaptation period on the basal diet. Ileal bacterial community profiles were analysed by denaturing gradient gel electrophoresis and selected bacterial groups quantified by real-time PCR. Concentrations of ileal volatile fatty acids (VFA), D- and L-lactate and ammonia were determined. Species richness, Shannon diversity and evenness were significantly higher at high ZnO levels. Quantitative PCR revealed lowest total bacterial counts in the 50 mg/kg group. Increasing ZnO levels led to an increase (p = 0.017) in enterobacteria from log 4.0 cfu/g digesta (50 mg/kg) to log 6.7 cfu/g digesta (2500 mg/kg). Lactic acid bacteria were not influenced (p = 0.687) and clostridial cluster XIVa declined (p = 0.035) at highest ZnO level. Concentration of total, D- and L-lactate and propionate was not affected (p = 0.736, p = 0.290 and p = 0.630), but concentrations of ileal total VFA, acetate and butyrate increased markedly from 50 to 150 mg/kg and decreased with further increasing zinc levels and reached low levels again at 2500 mg/kg (p = 0.048, p = 0.048 and p = 0.097). Ammonia decreased (p < 0.006) with increasing dietary ZnO level. In conclusion, increasing levels of dietary ZnO had strong and dose-dependent effects on ileal bacterial community composition and activity, suggesting taxonomic variation in metabolic response to ZnO.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".