Piglet research to help children (or clean up your act Captain Crunch!)

[Guest guest]

Using weanling pigs to uncover gut secrets

// 21 Jun 2010

Interview with Dr G. Burrin:

In the last decade, animal nutrition and animal health have increasingly been

linked together as one doesn't go without the other. In Vancouver, the role of

nutrition, amino acids and gut development will be presented by Dr Doug Burrin,

USDA.

Dr G Burrin - IPVS 2010It's not only pig diseases that will receive a

central focus, related research can sometimes shed a different light on pig

health as well. Keeping that in mind, Dr Burrin, attached to the USDA's

Children's Nutrition Research Center in Texas, USA, will speak at the IPVS

Congress about the role of nutrition in the weanling gut and in lactation. His

research and knowledge about weanling pigs and young developing pigs is not so

much swine-focused as it is a spin-off of a broader research theme into getting

to know the human infant's gut better. " The pig is a very good model for the

developing gut of the human infant, " Burrin explains. " We are trying to address

problems in the human population. Newborn pigs have about the same body size,

body composition, immunological function, and gut anatomy as the human infant.

He also uses the pig to examine nutritional questions that can't be expressed

with humans. " Our team surgically implants ultrasonic blood flow probes and

blood sample catheters into the artery and portal vein that supplies blood to

and from the gut and then measures the rates of amino acid absorption and

metabolism. "

Amino acids

The role of amino acids in the gut play an important role in his research,

Burrin says. " Amino acids are important not only for growth, but also as gut

fuels. They also have important functional effects on gut development. " Burrin

explains it's mainly about measuring amino acid metabolic balance.

" Using a surgical method, we can measure what the animal eats in very accurate

terms and we can measure what is absorbed in the blood from the gut. Not only

can we say: the gut takes 20% of the methionine (pictured) from the diet, we can

also say what happened to that methionine. Was it metabolised, incorporated into

protein or perhaps metabolised to another product such as homocystines. "

Breakthroughs

So far, his research in weanling pigs and other animals, like mice, has not

translated into practice, Burrin explains. " It mainly yielded fundamental basic

discoveries about how the gut metabolises nutrients. " " One of the things that we

have been progressing with is that we know that methionine is metabolised by the

gut. One of the products of that metabolism is a compound, called

methylthioadenosine (MTA) and we know from recent studies with mice that this

compound is relevant to inflammatory bowel disease. What we found is if we put

this particular product in the drinking water of mice, it is actually protective

in an experimental model of colitis. So we think that MTA may have important

anti-inflammatory effects. This may be important as a supplement for example in

treating people with inflammatory bowel disease. " The theme of amino acid

metabolism will return in Burrin's lecture in Vancouver – also in relation to

the use of antibiotics in feed. " We think that the gut bacteria are involved in

the process of metabolism. The question of whether animals receive antibiotics

or not and what are the beneficial effects of these antibiotics may have

something to do with animals' ability to metabolise amino acids in the gut. "

http://www.pigprogress.net/article-database/using-weanling-pigs-to-uncover-gut-s\

ecrets-id1015.html

The essential amino acid methionine is one of the whole food nutrients found in

nutriiveda http://pursuitofresearch.org/ingredients.html

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