Exploring diagnostic markers for gut health evaluation in broilers

Korte beschrijving

Intestinal diseases and multifactorial enteric syndromes (as dysbiosis) have increased substantially in broiler chickens, leading to poor performance, welfare issues and economic losses worldwide. Broiler chickens with enteric disease often present with subclinical symptoms. Today’s gut evaluation tests (i.e. macroscopic scoring systems) have multiple limitations (as being rather subjective, time-consuming) and are also not able to diagnose enteric diseases early on in the disease course. This diagnostic gap has launched the search for novel gut health diagnostic methods in commercial broiler chickens. Whilst various diagnostic tools (as histopathological parameters, faecal biomarkers) have been assessed under experimental conditions, the efficacy of gut health diagnostics and the link with other gut health parameters or broiler performance has, as far as we know, seldom been investigated in the field. The general objective of this PhD thesis was to explore well known gut health diagnostic methods (as histopathological parameters) in the field, benchmark novel gut health diagnostics (faecal biomarkers) against them and make associations with broiler performance.