Immune Boosting Dietary Compounds For Growth Promotion and Disease Control and Prevention

The overall goal of this project is to evaluate the in vitro and in vivo efficacy of several selected different combinations of natural dietary compounds in HDP induction, growth promotion, and bacterial clearance in chickens in both healthy and Salmonella-infected chickens, paving the way for their development as next-generation alternatives to antibiotics. The central hypothesis is that strategies to enhance HDP synthesis will confer on animals the capacity to fight off infections and promote growth. We plan to test this hypothesis and accomplish the overall goal by pursuing the following two specific objectives: 1) Identify the most efficient combinations of dietary compounds in inducing the synthesis of multiple endogenous HDPs without causing inflammation, and 2) Demonstrate selected compounds are as efficient as antibiotics in growth promotion and bacterial clearance in live animals.