Espinosa, Charmaine, Robert Scott Fry, Matthew Kocher, Hans H. Stein. 2020. Effects of copper hydroxychloride and distillers dried grains with solubles on intestinal microbial protein concentration and digestibility of energy, crude protein, and fat by growing pigs. J. Anim. Sci. 98(Suppl. 3): 83. doi.org/10.1093/jas/skaa054.148. (Abstr.). Link to abstract.

Espinosa, Charmaine D., R. Scott Fry, Matthew E. Kocher, and Hans H. Stein. 2020. Effects of copper hydroxychloride on growth performance and abundance of genes involved in lipid metabolism of growing pigs. Journal of Animal Science, 2020, 1–9. doi:10.1093/jas/skz369. Link to full text. 

Espinosa, Ch. D, R. Scott Fry, Matthew E. Kocher, Hans H. Stein. 2019. Effects of copper hydroxychloride and distillers dried grains with solubles on intestinal microbial concentration and apparent ileal and total tract digestibility of energy and nutrients by growing pigs. Journal of Animal Science, 2019, 4904–4911.

Most diets for weanling pigs contain highly digestible plant and animal proteins, but there is an increasing trend to include more fibrous co-products in diets for pigs due to reduced diet costs. However, feeding diets to nursery pigs with high concentration of dietary fiber may reduce nutrient digestibility, induce intestinal inflammation, and subsequently depress growth performance. Addition of 100 to 200 mg/kg of Cu from Cu hydroxychloride (IntelliBond C^II; Micronutrients USA LLC; Indianapolis, IN) to diets improves feed efficiency and reduces post weaning diarrhea in pigs. However, there are at this point no data to demonstrate the effect of Cu hydroxychloride on intestinal barrier integrity of pigs fed low-fiber or high-fiber diets, and it is not known if Cu hydroxychloride influences immune responses of pigs. Therefore, 2 experiments were conducted to test the hypothesis that inclusion of 150 mg/kg of Cu from Cu hydroxychloride reduces intestinal permeability and subsequently improves growth performance of pigs fed diets without or with high concentration of dietary fiber.

The requirement for Cu for normal metabolism by weanling pigs is 5 to 6 mg/kg, but it is common practice to include additional Cu in diets for pigs to enhance growth performance. Several modes of action for the improved growth performance have been proposed, and one proposed mode of action is the ability of Cu to alter microbial activity. The apparent total tract digestibility (ATTD) of acid hydrolyzed ether extract (AEE) is improved if Cu hydroxychloride is supplemented to high fiber diets. Therefore, an experiment was conducted to test the hypothesis that inclusion of 150 mg/kg of Cu from Cu hydroxychloride (IntelliBond C^II; Micronutrients USA LLC; Indianapolis, IN) to diets fed to growing pigs improves apparent ileal digestibility (AID) and ATTD of AEE, and the AID of crude protein. The second objective was to test the hypothesis that supplementing diets with Cu hydroxychloride can reduce the concentration of microbial protein in the small intestine or in the large intestine by pigs fed a corn-soybean meal diet or a diet based on corn, soybean meal, and distillers dried grains with solubles (DDGS).