To assess the impact of prebiotic supplementation during gestation and fetal and early neonatal life, gestating BALB/cj dam mice were fed either a control or a prebiotic (galacto-oligosaccharides–inulin, 9:1 ratio)-enriched diet throughout pregnancy and lactation, and allowed to nurse their pups until weaning. At the time of weaning, male offspring mice were separated from their mothers, weaned...

In recent years, there has been a growing appreciation on the relevance of gastrointestinal microflora in both ruminants and non-ruminants owing to revelation of their role in several physiological functions including digestion, nutrient utilization, pathogen exclusion, gastrointestinal development, immunity system, gut gene expression and quality of animal products. The ban imposed on the use ...

AIMS We assessed to what extent fructans of different degrees of polymerization (DP) differ in their prebiotic effectiveness towards in vitro microbial communities from the proximal and distal colon. METHODS AND RESULTS Two short chain fructans - oligofructose (DP 2-20) and inulin (DP 3-60) - were administered to the Simulator of the Human Intestinal Microbial Ecosystem (SHIME) at 2.5 g day(-...

The single-handedness of biological molecules is critical for molecular recognition and replication processes and would seem to be a prerequisite for the origin of life. A drawback of recently reported synthetic routes to RNA is the requirement for enantioenriched reactants, which fails to address the puzzle of how the single chirality of biological molecules arose. Here, we report the synthesi...

The celebrated Miller experiments reported on the spontaneous formation of amino acids from a mixture of simple molecules reacting under an electric discharge, giving birth to the research field of prebiotic chemistry. However, the chemical reactions involved in those experiments have never been studied at the atomic level. Here we report on, to our knowledge, the first ab initio computer simul...

A plausible process for non-enzymatic RNA replication would greatly simplify models of the transition from prebiotic chemistry to simple biology. However, all known conditions for the chemical copying of an RNA template result in the synthesis of a complementary strand that contains a mixture of 2'-5' and 3'-5' linkages, rather than the selective synthesis of only 3'-5' linkages as found in con...

This study was performed to investigate the effects of antibiotic, organic acid, probiotic and prebiotic supplementation on performance, egg shell quality, pH value of gastrointestinal (GI) tract and small intestinal morphology of laying hens. The experiment was a completely randomized design with 160 laying hens strain (W-36) from 32 to 42 weeks of age, with five treatments, four replicates an...

In the context of a "glyoxylate scenario" of primordial metabolism, the reactions of dihydroxyfumarate (DHF) with reactive small molecule aldehydes (e.g., glyoxylate, formaldehyde, glycolaldehyde, and glyceraldehyde) in water were investigated and shown to form dihydroxyacetone, tetrulose, and the two pentuloses, with almost quantitative conversion. The practically clean and selective formation...

We demonstrated the prebiotic effect of lacto-N-biose I (Galbeta1-3GlcNAc) on bifidobacteria in vitro. Lacto-N-biose I, a building unit of the type-I milk oligosaccharides, enhanced the growth of many bifidobacteria, especially Bifidobacterium bifidum, B. breve, and B. longum, which are predominant in the intestines of breast-fed infants. It might be a substantial, natural prebiotic in human co...