ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Vet. Sci.
Sec. Animal Nutrition and Metabolism
This article is part of the Research TopicSustainable Nutritional Strategies for Improving Health Status, Egg and Meat Quality in PoultryView all 24 articles
Lactulose as a prebiotic improved the intestinal health and metabolism of geese
Provisionally accepted
- Anhui Science and Technology University, Chuzhou, China
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Lactulose is highly valued for its unique role in promoting the growth of intestinal probiotics. The objective of this research was to investigate how varying levels of dietary protein combined with lactulose supplementation influence the intestinal health of geese, utilizing intestinal metabolomics as the analytical basis. A total of 210 one-day-old Yangzhou geese were randomly assigned to three dietary treatments, with each group consisting of 7 replicates of 10 birds each. The diet of the control group (CP) contained 18.18% crude protein, the high-protein group (HP) was provided a diet formulated to 21.12% crude protein, and the lactulose-supplemented group (LS) received the high-protein diet (21.12%) with an additional 0.30% lactulose inclusion. The results showed that compared with the HP group, lactulose increased the average daily weight gain of geese (P < 0.05), reduced the feed conversion rate (P > 0.05), and decreased the level of uric acid in serum (P < 0.05). At the same time, lactulose improved the morphological structure of the ileum and increased the intestinal villus height (VH) (P < 0.01) and villus height/crypt depth ratio (VH/CD) (P < 0.05). Compared with HP, the total number of aerobic bacteria, Escherichia coli and Salmonella in cecum decreased by 2.70%, 9.28% and 12.26 %, respectively. Non-targeted metabolomics analysis showed that lactulose regulated intestinal barrier structure and intestinal flora through glycerophospholipid metabolism and fatty acid metabolism, which further improved the intestinal health of geese.
Keywords: Lactulose, growth performance, Uric Acid, Intestinal morphology, intestinal flora, Metabolites
Received: 09 Oct 2025; Accepted: 17 Nov 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Wang, Ye, Zhu, Zhu, He, Meng, Cao and Zhao. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Pengfei Ye, yepf@ahstu.edu.cn
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