Team:Shanghai City United/Implementation
Implementation
Feed Additives Make the Poultry Grain Feed
Powerful in Digestion
Monogastric animals (such as poultry) have simple digestive tract. Their digestive
organs are small in volume and cannot secrete cellulase and hemicellulase. However, saliva contains a large
amount of a-amylase, which can hydrolyze the a-1,4 glucose in the starch and make it a chain, including
maltose, dextrin, and so on. In the small intestine, small intestinal mucosal epithelial cells can produce a
variety of enzymes, such as lactase, maltase, etc., which can hydrolyze lactose cellobiose, maltose,
isomaltose a-1,6 chain dextrin, powder, and so on. Therefore, monogastric animals are suitable for various
grains and other refined feeds.
However, monogastric animals can not digest the xylan contained in grain feed,
which may lead to a series of digestion problems for monogastric animals. Poultry are typical monogastric
animals. Poultry breeding industry impact our daily life, thereafter, how to provide poultry breeders with
high-quality feed is a critical issue. To address this issue, we start our project, aiming at developing a
probiotic (Lactobacillus) containing xylanase to produce feed additives. The feed additives will be added to
liquid beverage tailored for poultry.
The potential end users of our products should mainly be poultry feed producers and
poultry breeders. We consider about two major business channels: 1) We will cooperate with poultry feed
producers to produce our feed additives and the liquid beverage; 2) We will try to produce the feed
additives and the liquid beverage ourselves and then sell them to poultry breeders.
Disign Concept of Our Product
Our project is to design an edible "drink" for monogastric animals, main poultry
through biosynthesis technology.
The core product will be a probiotic that can produce xylanase. In this project, we
designed to construct the target plasmids through PCR amplifying genes, electrophoresis appraisal, and
ligation experiments, then we transformed them into E. coli and Lactobacillus reuteri for further
performance analysis.
Compared to traditional feed, our drink contains probiotics that could help poultry
digest xylan, thus increasing feed efficiency. In this way, not only can the time and economic cost of
feeding be saved, but also the gastrointestinal tract of the animal can be protected and thus the disease
rate can be reduced.
Currently, we have obtained the engineered L. returei which carries the plasmind
pSIP403-PUS-xyn AM and is verified to have well enzyme activity. To sum up, our product design is applicable
and promising.
Safety Concerns and Challenges Confronted with
Our Implementation
1) Market response towards engineered probiotic products
· In reality, lots of people hold biases towards GMO products, especially about
their safety. Thus, our products may also be faced with the same challenge. Will our products cause harm to
the poultry’s health, especially to the digestion system?
· To tackle this issue, further safety tests regarding our probiotic
(Lactobacillus) should be made.
· Meanwhile, we need to make a series of safety education activities to inform our
potential clients of the GMO techniques, especially about their safety issues.
2) Government regulations on our engineered probiotic products
GMO products are strictly administrated in China, thus the commercialization of our
products may be quite challenging due to relevant policies.
· To overcome this issue, we need to study the administration policies very clearly
and follow every step strictly.
· Meanwhile, we should consider about consulting patent protection experts, legal
experts and experienced GMO experts to lower the possible legal risk.
3) Effectiveness of our engineered probiotic products
According to our design, the feed additives and liquid beverage will take effect
within poultry’s digestion system. However, since it is very difficult for xylanase to be inactivated, it is
possible that our product me be ineffective in practice.
· To overcome this challenge, we must be very cautious in further experiments to
test the effectiveness of our products. (SURELY within the scope of iGEM, NO in vivo experiments are to be
done)