Response to meat and bone meal, phytase and antibiotics on gut permeability, nutrient digestibility and caecal microflora in broiler chickens during a necrotic enteritis challenge

Necrotic enteritis (NE) is an enterotoxaemia of poultry with a significant economic effect on poultry production. Currently, antibiotics effectively prevent NE, but there is a global push for reduced reliance on the use of in-feed antibiotics (Castanon, 2007). Preventative treatments focus on the predisposing factors that instigate the disease. One such factor is meat and bone meal (MBM). The ingestible proteins in MBM (Kim, et al., 2012) cause production of toxic metabolites via proliferation of putrefying bacteria, such as highly proteolytic C. perfringens (Sharma, et al., 2017). Supplementing broiler diets with a 'superdose' of phytase has previously been shown to improve performance in NE challenged birds. The aim of this study was to investigate the effects of phytase in NE challenged birds fed MBM based diets, on gut permeability, nutrient digestibility and caecal microflora