Effects of Lactobacillus acidophilus and zinc oxide on the growth performance, jejunal morphology and immune function of weaned piglet following an Escherichia coli K88 challenge

Abstract

This study evaluated the effects of Lactobacillus acidophilus (LA) and zinc oxide (ZnO) supplementation on the growth performance, jejunal morphology and immune function of weaned piglets challenged with Escherichia coli K88. A total of 96 weaned piglets were randomly allocated to four treatments in a 28-day experiment with a 2 × 2 factorial experiment involving two levels of L. acidophilus (0 and 5 × 1010 CFU/kg feed), and two levels of ZnO (0 or 3000 mg/kg feed). One piglet per pen was chosen and orally challenged with Escherichia coli K88 on day 28 and slaughtered at 6 hours post-infection. The results showed that LA supplementation increased the average daily gain from day 0 to day 28 (p =.025). Piglets fed with the diets containing LA or ZnO showed lower feed conversion ratio than the unsupplemented group (p