Early weaning often causes intestinal dysfunction, which further results in loss of appetite, growth retardation, high incidence of diarrhea, and increased risks of diseases and mortality. These problems caused a highly economic loss in pig industry worldwide.

Therefore, studies are imperative to identify effective nutrients to prevent these damages

Serine, recently classified as a conditionally non-essential amino acid, has been proved to exert strong beneficial effects on oxidative stress, inflammatory response, apoptosis and intestinal morphological damage, which are all caused by early weaning.

However, all these experiments were performed with rodent model. To people’s knowledge, no previous studies have considered the effects of dietary serine supplementation on early-weaned piglets.

Researchers in the Institute of Subtropical Agriculture (ISA) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences conducted an experiment to explore whether serine prevents intestinal dysfunction caused by early weaning in piglets.

In their study, weaned piglets aged 21 d were randomly divided into two groups: one group fed a basal diet (met recommended nutrient requirement of NRC 2012) and another group fed a basal diet plus 0.2% serine.

The researchers found that serine supplementation increased daily body weight gain while it decreased diarrhea incidence. The small intestine of serine-supplemented piglets showed regularly arranged villi and microvilli, suggesting that serine protects intestinal morphology.

Moreover, dietary serine alleviated apoptosis, inflammatory response, and oxidative stress in the small intestine of early-weaned piglets.
"Our findings suggest that serine has the potential for use as a feed additive to prevent intestinal dysfunction caused by weaning," said ZHOU Xihong, a researcher in ISA.

The study, supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China, can be found at: https://www.karger.com/Article/FullText/491967.
And the research result entitled “Effects of dietary serine supplementation on intestinal integrity, inflammation and oxidative status in early-weaned piglets” was published in Cellular Physiology and Biochemistry.

Contact: ZHOU Xihong

E-mail:  xhzhou@isa.ac.cn

Institute of Subtropical Agriculture, Chinese Academy of Sciences