Association between intestinal microbiota composition and tail-biting in pigs
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Background: Tail-biting (TB) is a serious behavioral disorder in pigs. It is defined as a pig chewing the tail of another pig. It is an important challenge in swine production as it impacts the animal welfare, its health and the economics and safety of the pork meat supply chain. Some treatments have been proposed but have not proven optimal. Nutrition, feed type and composition, appears to be an important factor in TB behavior, perhaps by modulating the intestinal microbiota (IM). In humans, IM is increasingly recognized as a modulator of behavior. Our aim was to assess an association between TB behavior and IM in pigs through comparisons of IM in groups of biter or bitten pigs to the IM in a non-biter and non-bitten negative control group, and through comparisons of IM between the biter and bitten groups. Each group, composed of 12 pigs, was formed at the beginning of the growing/finishing phase based on a target behavior analysis centered on TB behavior for the biter group and a score of damages caused to the tail for the bitten group. Fecal and blood samples were collected from each pig during a TB episode, at time 0, t0, and after a TB episode, four weeks later, at time 1, t1. Serum cortisol level was determined by ELISA and used as an indicator of stress. The pig’s fecal microbiota was analyzed from DNA extracted from freshly collected fecal matter using amplicon sequencing of the V4 hypervariable region of the 16S rRNA gene. Results: Serum cortisol levels were significantly higher in either the biter or bitten pig groups compared to the negative control group ( p =0.02 and p =0.01, respectively). Interestingly, no significant difference was revealed between the biter and bitten groups. The microbiota alpha-diversity was not significantly different between all groups, biter, bitten and negative control. Analyses of beta-diversity, however, revealed a significant difference between either the biter or the bitten group in comparison to the negative control group in terms of structure and composition of the microbiota. Lactobacillus were significantly more abundant in the negative control group compared to the two other groups ( p =0.001). No significant difference was revealed between the biter and bitten groups. Quantitative real-time PCR (qPCR) confirmed that lactobacilli were more abundant in the negative control group. Conclusions: This study demonstrates that TB behavior is associated to the IM composition in pigs.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| 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 | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".