Caecal Microbiome Transplant:a novel approach to Campylobacter control and improving broiler chicken gut heath.

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The modern broiler (or meat-producing) chicken is one of the best examples of how the appliance of science and selective breeding can lead to an efficient and sustainable system to produce cheap and nutritious food. However this comes at a cost. The modern hybrid broiler breed has a number of health and welfare problems including poor gut health than can lead to a problem known as 'wet litter' due to watery faeces. In turn birds stand on the wet litter leading to skin burns and irritation that affect their welfare. Several types of bacteria that can cause food poisoning can also live and replicate in the intestines of broiler chickens and can be shed in the faeces leading to rapid spread of these bacteria, including Campylobacter and Salmonella, though chicken flocks and on to the human food chain. Understanding how the chicken keeps its intestines healthy and how it interacts both with disease-causing bacteria and the bacteria that naturally occur in the gut (the microbiota) are important in improving welfare of these animals and in finding ways we can control the disease-causing bacteria or pathogens.In recent years the importance of the gut microbiome in heath and disease has become increasingly apparent, not just on the health of the gut but on areas as diverse as obesity and mental health. One area of this research with a particularly strong profile is in Faecal Microbiota Transplant also called more simply a faecal or stool transplant. As it suggests this involves transfer faecal material from a health donor to patients with the hospital-acquired infection, Clostridium difficle. The approach has been very successful and has been applied experimental to other intestinal diseases and even to conditions affecting the nervous system. In this project we propose to transfer the healthy microbiome from older chickens to newly hatched chicks. In modern chicken production chicks have no contact with their mothers, the main source of the microbiome in mammals. As such they do not develop a 'chicken' microbiome until later in life. We believe this contributes both to the poor gut health of broiler chickens and to their susceptibility to Campylobacter infection. We have shown in initial experiments that transfer of the intestinal (caecal) content from an 8-week old healthy bird improves the gut health of the chicks but more significantly both reduces the levels of Campylobacter in the chicken gut in experimental infection and hinders this bacteria spreading from bird-to bird. We believe that this can be developed as an effective control for Campylobacter.In the project we aim to do the following1. Understanding how the transplant modifies the microbiota and affects the immune system2. Show which changes to the microbiome and immune system are important in reducing susceptibility to infection3. Further develop the transplant technology and assess if methods used to deliver live vaccines to chicks can be adopted to deliver a transplantIn this project we propose develop the caecal microbiome transplant sufficiently to attract industrial partners to take forward to becoming a product that can help improving the health of billions of chickens reared annually in the world and reduce the levels of Campylobacter which cause over half a million cases of gastroenteritis in England and Wales each year.