For most modern people, they are more or less suffering from the problem of intestinal digestion and absorption, such as diarrhea and constipation. As is the case of pigs under modern breeding technology, especially the early weaned pigs. They often grow slowly and even have the possibility to die resulting from the intestinal distress. In that case, it will bring huge losses to farmers and even endanger the economy of a country. Therefore, a wide range of people from the scientists, government and enterprises have paid high attention to the intestinal health of early weaned piglets. They have made great efforts in their own aspects to improve intestinal health and promote growth performance of piglets.

Proline is one of the most abundant amino acid in sow's colostrum and milk. Previous studies have shown that proline is an indispensable amino acid in the diets of 2.5-kg pigs and young chicks. Young pigs have a limited ability to synthesize proline from arginine, glutamine or glutamate in the small intestine, thus, dietary supplementation with proline could play an important role for the weaned piglets. There has been growing interest in proline metabolism and nutrition over the past decade. Growing evidence shows that proline plays an important role in differentiation and multiple biochemical and physiological processes in cells, as well as conceptus growth and development. Porline could play an essential role in improving small-intestinal morphology in the weaned piglets. However, the underlying mechanisms are unknown.

Using lipopolysaccharide (LPS) as a tool to induce sickness behavior in the pigs, a team of researchers from Wuhan Polytechnic University, Institute of Subtropical Agriculture, the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and Texas A & M University conduct a trail to study the effect of L-proline on the growth performance, and blood parameter in the weaned LPS-challenged pigs. They hypothesized that proline could improve growth performance and relieve LPS challenge by reducing intestinal oxidative stress, stimulating some growth factors or hormones secretion, and improving the digestibility in piglets.

The researchers found that proline supplementation could improve growth performance, increase SOD activities, and has a positive effect on the gastrointestinal tract digestibility in early weaned pigs. These results indicated that exogenous proline should be appropriate to add in the early weaned pigs’ diets in order to achieve better growth performance.

This research was jointly supported by National Basic Research Program of China (NO. 2012CB126305), Hubei Provincial Research and Development Program (NO. 2010BB023), and Natural Science Foundation of Hubei Province (NO. 2012FFB04805, 2011CDA131).

The study entitled “Effects of L-proline on the Growth Performance, and Blood Parameters in Weaned Lipopolysaccharide (LPS)-challenged Pigs” has been published in Volume 27, Issue 8, August 2014 of Asian-Australasian Journal of Animal Sciences, details could be found at http://dx.doi.org/10.5713/ajas.2013.13828

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