Metabolic Effects of Animal Growth Promoters

Dear Colleagues,

Robust and efficient metabolism is the foundation of animal growth and production, serving as a determining factor of feed efficiency. Diverse approaches have been adopted in the livestock industry to enhance feed efficiency, targeting either feed or animal. Common targets of growth promotion in feed formulation are energy density, nutrient profile, and digestibility, while the targets in animal are numerous, including immune response, microbial metabolism, redox balance, and muscle growth. All these approaches can affect metabolism either directly or indirectly. Among these approaches, antimicrobial growth promoters (AGPs) were widely used in livestock production until very recently, but this practice has been largely prohibited due to concerns regarding resistant microbes and food safety. Therefore, extensive effort has been dedicated to the search for alternatives to AGPs, with the goal of replicating the metabolic effects of AGPs. This Topic Collection aims to explore the influences of growth promoters on these metabolic events, including metabolites, enzymes, genes and regulators, and their contributions to animal growth and health. Because diverse metabolic events occur in the complex and multi-step process of converting the nutrients in feed to the body mass of production animals, coverage of this Topic Collection includes, but is not limited to, the following topics:

• Metabolic fates of growth promoters;
• Effects of growth promoters on digestion, absorption, distribution and metabolism of nutrients;
• Effects of growth promoters on microbial metabolism;
• Effects of growth promoters on nutrient metabolism and redox balance.

Dr. Chi Chen
Collection Editor

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