Espinosa, C. D., R. S. Fry, M. E. Kocher, H. H. Stein. 2020. Effects of copper hydroxychloride and dietary fiber on intestinal permeability, growth performance, and blood characteristics of nursery pigs. Animal Feed Science and Technology 263 (2020) 114447. Link to full text.

Casas, Gloria A., Laia Blavi, Tzu-Wen L. Cross, Anne H. Lee, Kelly S. Swanson, and Hans H. Stein. 2020. Inclusion of the direct-fed microbial Clostridium butyricum in diets for weanling pigs increases growth performance and tends to increase villus height and crypt depth, but does not change intestinal microbial abundance. Journal of Animal Science, 2020, 1–12. doi:10.1093/jas/skz372.

Espinosa, C. D., R. S. Fry, J. Usry, and H. H. Stein. 2019. Effects of copper hydroxychloride and choice white grease on growth performance and blood characteristics of weanling pigs kept at normal ambient temperature or under heat stress. Anim. Feed Sci. Technol.256:114257. doi.org/10.1016/j.anifeedsci.2019.114257. Link to full text.

Tryptophan is an indispensable AA that is often limiting for growth in pigs fed corn-soybean meal-based diets. Tryptophan may act as a regulator of feed intake by enhancing serotonin signaling in the brain, because Trp is a precursor for serotonin. High Trp intake increases feed intake, and this is partly attributed to increased serotonin synthesis. Availability of dietary Trp in the brain is considered the rate-limiting step in hypothalamic serotonin synthesis. However, to be transported into the brain, Trp competes with other large neutral AA such as Val, Leu, Ile, Tyr, and Phe for a common transporter (L-type AA transporter 1) to cross the blood-brain barrier.

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.

Supplementing Cu to diets fed to pigs at 100 to 250 mg/kg may reduce post-weaning scouring and also improve ADG and ADFI. Addition of Cu at 250 mg/kg in diets for pigs containing 5% animal fat improved growth performance, and it was speculated that this is due to the ability of Cu to improve animal fat utilization and enzymatic activity. Inclusion of 45 mg/kg of dietary Cu in diets for rabbits improved body mass gain by upregulating mRNA transcription of fatty acid transport protein, fatty acid binding protein, and carnitine palmitoyl transferase 1, indicating that dietary Cu may influence post-absorptive metabolism of lipids. However, the effect of supplementing dietary Cu on post-absorptive lipid metabolism in pigs remains inconclusive. Therefore, an experiment was conducted to test the hypothesis that addition of 150 mg/kg Cu from Cu hydroxychloride (IntelliBond C^II; Micronutrients USA LLC; Indianapolis, IN) to a diet based on corn, soybean meal (SBM), and distillers dried grains with solubles (DDGS) improves growth performance of pigs, and that dietary Cu influences mRNA abundance of genes involved in post-absorptive metabolism of lipids in pigs.

Kwon Woong B., Kevin J. Touchette, Aude Simongiovanni, Kostas Syriopoulos, Anna Wessels, Hans H. Stein. 2019. Effects of dietary leucine concentration on branched-chain amino acid metabolism in growing pigs. Journal of Animal Science, Volume 97, Issue Supplement_2, July 2019, Pages 65–66. (Abstr.). Link to abstract.

Kwon, W. B., and H. H. Stein. 2019. Excess leucine reduces nitrogen retention, growth performance in pigs. July 29, 2019. Link to ful text.

Soybean meal (SBM) is one of the most important protein sources in swine diets. However, SBM has high concentrations of non-digestible oligosaccharides, mainly stachyose, raffinose, and verbascose, which may increase diarrhea incidence and reduce nursery growth performance. Fermex 200 (Purina Animal Nutrition, Shoreview, MN, USA) is a new source of fermented SBM that may serve as an alternative to other protein sources in diets fed to pigs. However, there are at this point no data for effects of Fermex 200 on growth performance and amino acid (AA) digestibility when fed to weanling pigs.

Therefore, 2 experiments were conducted to test the hypothesis that the apparent ileal digestibility (AID) and standardized ileal digestibility (SID) of AA in Fermex 200 are greater than in conventional SBM. The second hypothesis was that Fermex 200 supports growth of weanling pigs as well as other protein sources.