In pig industry, early weaning often causes intestinal dysfunction, which further results in loss of appetite, growth retardation, high incidence of diarrhea, and increasing risks of diseases and mortality. These problems may cause economic loss.

Serine, recently classified as a conditionally non-essential amino acid, has been proved to exert strong beneficial effects on oxidative stress, inflammatory response, apoptosis and intestinal morphological damage, which are all caused by early weaning. However, all these experiments were performed with rodent model.

Researchers in the Institute of Subtropical Agriculture (ISA) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences conducted an experiment to explore whether serine could prevent intestinal dysfunction caused by early weaning in piglets.

In their study, weaned piglets aged 21 d were randomly divided into two groups: one group were fed with a basal diet (met recommended nutrient requirement of NRC 2012) and another group with a basal diet plus 0.2% serine.

The researchers found that serine supplementation increased daily body weight gain and decreased diarrhea incidence. The small intestine of serine-supplemented piglets showed regularly arranged villi and microvilli, suggesting that serine protected intestinal morphology.

Moreover, dietary serine alleviated apoptosis, inflammatory response, and oxidative stress in the small intestine of early-weaned piglets.

"Our findings suggest that serine has the potential as a feed additive to prevent intestinal dysfunction caused by weaning," said ZHOU Xihong, a researcher in ISA.

The study, supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China, was published in Cellular Physiology and Biochemistry.