Nutritional strategies to optimize the integration of weaning piglet diets with trace elements to promote intestinal health and reduce environmental impact.
Dietary supplementation with microelements is an overall nutritional strategy to satisfy piglet growth requirements and enhance gut health. They are generally supplemented as inorganic forms characterized by low bioavailability, which results in many trace elements being excreted in feces and urine that accumulate in the soil harming the environment. The trace elements mainly used in the piglet diet are copper and zinc. Improving their bioavailability is of great significance for reducing the supplementation of exogenous trace elements in feed, thus improving animal health and protecting the environment. The overriding theme of this project is to optimize the levels of microelements in the diet and to use the form/dosages established by current legislation with more bioavailable products characterized by low environmental impact with an emphasis on gut health, immunity, and microbiology.
The project’s endpoint is to determine the effects of alternative formulations of Zinc and Copper on gut health, immunity, and microbiology of newly weaned piglets.
The PhD student will be involved in a series of in vivo trials in which alternative Zinc (Zn) and Copper (Cu) will be mixed in the diets ofpostweaning piglets, confronting them to the classic solution nowadays adopted. In particular,during the trials, the effects of these substances on performance, gut health, and immunity will be investigated to find an ensemble of valid solutions to the ban of pharmacological dosages of zinc oxide and the reduction of the permitted levels of copper sulfate in swine diets, promoted by the European Commission. Briefly, it is widely recognized how zinc and copper accumulated during the years in European soils through the spreading of livestock sewage, promoting some negative phenomena such as water eutrophication, soil degradation, and cross-resistance or co-selection in antimicrobial resistance bacterial strains. The project will be conducted to obtain the same or better effects on the gut health of post-weanling piglets by administering more bioavailable alternatives compared to zinc oxide and copper sulfate. In addition, in vitro trials will be conducted on intestinal porcine enterocyte models tocomprehensively evaluate the possible gut health status after experimental treatments. These series of trials will characterize a pathway towards new and more ecological solutions for animal nutrition, ensuring the health and welfare of animals in particularly delicate phases such as the post-weaning transition. The research activity will take place in collaboration with an ensemble of stakeholders involved in the feed production chain and foreign universities through a research secondment abroad, allowing the enrolled candidate to get in contact with multiple production realities of the livestock world.
He graduated with a degree in Science and Technology of Animal Production at the University of Milan (UNIMI), a course during which he developed a strong interest in feeding and nutrition livestock animals. Having carried out a thesis focused on supplementing weanling piglets’ diets with synthetic molecules of natural derivation, he decided to continue the study of alternative molecules to antibiotics and pharmacological dosages of trace elements intended for swine nutrition. Specifically, through the PhD course in which he has been enrolled since October 2021, he focused his early research activity on the study of more bioavailable sources of Zinc and Copper to include in piglets’ diets to ensure gut health and the immune status of the animals while reducing the environmental impact of these molecules by decreasing the excretion of unabsorbed trace elements.
Publications: Orcid ; IRIS-AIR
Supervisor Prof. Valentino Bontempo
