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Effects of Feather Hydrolysates Generated by Probiotic Bacillus licheniformis WHU on Gut Microbiota of Broiler and Common carp

  • Synthetic Microbiology and Biotechnology
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Abstract

Due to the ever-increasing demand for meat, it has become necessary to identify cheap and sustainable sources of protein for animal feed. Feathers are the major byproduct of poultry industry, which are rich in hard-to-degrade keratin protein. Previously we found that intact feathers can be digested into free amino acids, short peptides, and nano-/micro-keratin particles by the strain Bacillus licheniformis WHU in water, and the resulting feather hydrolysates exhibit prebiotic effects on mice. To explore the potential utilization of feather hydrolysate in the feed industry, we investigated its effects on the gut microbiota of broilers and fish. Our results suggest that feather hydrolysates significantly decrease and increase the diversity of gut microbial communities in broilers and fish, respectively. The composition of the gut microbiota was markedly altered in both of the animals. The abundance of bacteria with potentially pathogenic phenotypes in the gut microbial community of the fish significantly decreased. Staphylococcus spp., Pseudomonas spp., Neisseria spp., Achromobacter spp. were significantly inhibited by the feather hydrolysates. In addition, feather hydrolysates significantly improved proteolytic activity in the guts of broilers and fish. In fish, the expression levels of ZO-1 and TGF-α significantly improved after administration of feather hydrolysates. The results presented here suggest that feather hydrolysates generated by B. licheniformis WHU could be an alternative protein source in aquaculture and could exert beneficial effects on fish.

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Data Availability

The data used in this study are available from the corresponding author upon request.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by a Collaborative Fund from Luzhou Government and Southwest Medical University (No. 2020LZXNYDJ29) and a Fund from Southwest Medical University (No. 2021ZKMS045).

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  1. Kamin Ke and Yingjie Sun have contributed equally to this work.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Pharmacy, Southwest Medical University, Luzhou, 646000, People’s Republic of China

    Kamin Ke, Yingjie Sun, Tingting He, Wenbo Liu, Yijiao Wen, Siyuan Liu, Qin Wang & Xiaowei Gao

  2. Dazhou Vocational College of Chinese Medicine, Dazhou, 635000, People’s Republic of China

    Qin Wang

  3. Green Pharmaceutical Technology Key Laboratory of Luzhou, Southwest Medical University, Luzhou, 646000, People’s Republic of China

    Xiaowei Gao

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  1. Kamin Ke
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Contributions

FK, YS, TH: Study design, experiments, and data analysis; YW, SL, and WL: experiments; QW: Writing and revision of the manuscript; XG: Study design, data analysis, writing and revision, and funding.

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Correspondence to Qin Wang or Xiaowei Gao.

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Ethical Statements

The animal experiments in the study were approved by the Ethics Committee of Southwest Medical University (No. 20230226-009) and followed the Guidelines for Care and Use of Laboratory Animals of the Southwest Medical University.

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Ke, K., Sun, Y., He, T. et al. Effects of Feather Hydrolysates Generated by Probiotic Bacillus licheniformis WHU on Gut Microbiota of Broiler and Common carp. J Microbiol. (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12275-024-00118-z

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