The development of a semisynthetic diet deficient in methionine for adult cats for controlled feline nutrition studies: effects on acceptability, preference, and behavior responses
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Chemically defined diets are commonly used in amino acid (AA) requirement studies to allow for tight control of AA delivery. However, those diets are not representative of commercial diets in the market and are unpalatable. Methionine (Met) is usually the first limiting AA in cat diets, but little is known about its requirement for adult cats. Thus, the objectives of this study were: 1) to develop a semisynthetic diet limiting in Met and evaluate its effect on acceptance and feeding behavior in cats; and 2) to evaluate the effect of different sources and inclusions of Met on preference in cats fed the semisynthetic diet. A semisynthetic diet deficient in Met and total sulfur AA (TSAA) was developed. Healthy adult male cats (n = 9) were fed (0800 and 1600 h) the semisynthetic diet top dressed with DL-Met solution (T-DLM), to meet 120% of the TSAA requirement, for 8 d. Feed intake was measured and a 30-min video recording was taken at the 0800 h feeding to evaluate feeding behavior of the cats. Following the acceptability trial, two bowl tests were performed where first choice was recorded and intake ratio was calculated as consumed food (A/A + B). Three combinations were tested: semisynthetic diet deficient in Met (T-BASAL) vs. T-DLM; T-BASAL vs. diet sufficient in Met provided 2-hydroxy-4-(methylthio)-butanoic acid (T-MHA); and T-DLM vs. T-MHA. Average feed intake remained high throughout the acceptability period (94.5% intake of total offered), but some cats decreased intake, resulting in a decrease in BW (≤2.5% of initial BW) over time (P < 0.05). Behaviors were similar among days (P > 0.05) with the exception of grooming the chest and body (P < 0.05). No preferences were observed towards a specific treatment (Met source and level) during the two-bowl tests (P > 0.05) and agreed with the cats expressing similar feeding behaviors during the preference tests (P > 0.05). In conclusion, a semisynthetic diet deficient in Met was successfully developed and can be used in studies to evaluate the effects of low protein and AA supplemented diets. Cats seem to show no preference for Met source and/or inclusion level in a semisynthetic diet application, which is of benefit for future studies aiming to determine the Met requirement in this species.
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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 | 0.006 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 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".