Cohousing-mediated microbiota transfer promotes bone health and modulates gut integrity, and immunity in young broiler chickens
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The intestine hosts a complex microbiota, which plays a crucial role in health and development. This study investigated the impact of cohousing day-old broilers with 14-day-old (CH14) or 42-day-old (CH42) broiler chickens and their fecal material for a week, compared to a non-cohoused control group. Birds were raised for 42 days, and bone traits, gut integrity and microbiota, cytokine and antimicrobial peptide profiles, and T cell immunity subsets were assessed at days 14 and 42. Production parameters were recorded weekly, and mortality daily. Both treatment groups exhibited significantly improved tibial bone length, cortical bone volume, and mineral density, with reduced pore volume and diameter. These effects were more pronounced in CH42 birds at day 14. Pro-inflammatory (IL-6, IL-17, IL-1β, IL-2, AvBD-4, AvBD-7) and anti-inflammatory (IL-10, TGF-β) markers were monitored, with CH42 birds showing significantly higher levels of both IL-10 and TGF-β at day 42. CH42 birds had higher CD4+CD25+ T regulatory cells and lower CD4+ T cells, while CD8+ T cells remained unchanged. Gut integrity markers (Claudin-2, Occludin, ZO-1, JAM-2) were improved in both groups. CH42 birds showed increased microbiota alpha and beta diversity and Firmicutes dominance by day 42. Cohousing and fecal material transfer improved bone development, gut integrity and microbiota, and immune homeostasis, highlighting the potential of older birds' microbiota and inspiring the development of microbiota-based approaches to enhance poultry health, welfare, and management.
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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 | 0.001 |
| 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".