Effects of Dietary Fructooligosaccharide on Digestive Enzyme Activities, Intestinal Microflora and Morphology of Growing Pigs

Animals and experimental dietsA total of 128 growing barrows (Jiaxing Black×Duroc×Landrace) at an average BW of 20.8 Kg were allocated to 4 treatments for 42 days, each of which was replicated four times with eight pigs per replicate.The pigs received the same basal diet based on corn-soybean meal and FOS was added to the basal diet at 0, 2, 4, 6 g/kg diet at the expense of corn, respectively.The FOS (Meioligo-P) was provided by Meiji Seika kaisha, Ltd. (Tokyo, Japan) and the concentration of oligosaccharides was analyzed by HPLC.The main ingredients of this product are glucose, fructose, sucrose and FOS.The glucose, fructose and sucrose amount to 2.8% and the FOS amount to 97.2%.The FOS consist of three kinds of materials (GF n : G refers to glucosyl moiety, F to the fructosyl moiety and n indicates the number of the fructosyl moieties in the molecules, n=2, 3, 4).GF 2 , GF 3 and GF 4 amount to 46.8, 39.3 and 11.1%, respectively.Diets were formulated to meet or exceed nutrient requirements suggested by the NRC (1998) for 20 to 50 kg pigs.Antibiotic was excluded from all diets (Table 1).All pigs were given ad libitum access to feed and water.Growth performance results such as average daily gain (ADG), average daily feed intake (ADFI), and Effects of Dietary Fructooligosaccharide on Digestive Enzyme Activities, Intestinal Microflora and Morphology of Growing Pigs A