Exploring frailty in apparently healthy senior dogs: a cross-sectional study.

Background: As dogs age, they face various health challenges, and preventive care may be overlooked, impacting their quality of life. Frailty, a concept established in human medicine, has recently been applied to dogs using validated tools like the frailty index and frailty phenotype. This study aims to characterize frailty in senior pet dogs and investigate associated factors.

Relationship between feed efficiency and gut microbiota in laying chickens under contrasting feeding conditions.

The gut microbiota is known to play an important role in energy harvest and is likely to affect feed efficiency. In this study, we used 16S metabarcoding sequencing to analyse the caecal microbiota of laying hens from feed-efficient and non-efficient lines obtained by divergent selection for residual feed intake. The two lines were fed either a commercial wheat-soybean based diet (CTR) or a low-energy, high-fibre corn-sunflower diet (LE).

Microbiability of milk composition and genetic control of microbiota effects in sheep.

Recently, high-dimensional omics data are becoming available in larger quantities, and models have been developed that integrate them with genomics to understand in finer detail the relationship between genotype and phenotype, and thus improve the performance of genetic evaluations. Our objectives are to quantify the effect of the inclusion of microbiome data in the genetic evaluation for dairy traits in sheep, through the estimation of the heritability, microbiability, and how the microbiome effect on dairy traits decomposes into genetic and nongenetic parts. In this study we analyzed milk and rumen samples of 795 Lacaune dairy ewes.

Predicting feed efficiency traits in growing lambs from their ruminal microbiota.

Selecting feed-efficient sheep could improve the sustainability of this livestock production. However, most sheep breeding companies cannot afford to record feed intake to select feed-efficient animals. Past studies underlined the potential of omics data, including microbiota metabarcoding data, as proxies for feed efficiency.