Poultry have significant microbial activity in the caeca and these microbes can be refluxed from the caeca to the proximal GIT which presents an opportunity for them to be absorbed in small intestines. Is there any way that these microbial amino acids can be quantified?
Caecetomised cocks are occasionally used in digestion studies on protein/amino acids. Then the influence of the caeca is not present. One might envisage a comparison of normal and caecectomised animals to study and maybe quantify the contribution of the microbial amino acids.
I agree with CA kees. Morever I suppose you want to evaluate this effects at the distal ileum. If yes you can use the regression method whereby you set up parallel response curves under microbial and some kind of gnotobiotic condition (depending on facility available to you). You may add an antibiotic to a set of feeds to mimic such a state, if you are limited by facilities. Look up the work done by M.E Coates et al in the 50s or 60s who reported some very wonderful investigation with chicks kept under Gnotobiotic conditions, it will enrich your literature background.
To help you to get acquainted with the old literature on intestinal amino acid absorption in poultry attached my review on that topic from 40 years ago.
Another possible strategy would be to employ in vitro culture / incubation of caecal inoculation with some feed substrates and then measure microbial protein yield and amino acid synthesis at various time periods. In this regard, you may benefit from the publication by Dunkley et al 2007 (Poultry Science 86: 801 - 810). Alternatively, you could possibly explore the use of radio-labelled N and C incorporation into caecal microbial and chicken body proteins and amino acids. In this connection, it should be possible to administer radio-labelled 15N as 15NHCl and 14C as 14C-polyglucose into the caecum, and subsequently measure radio-labelled proteins and amino acids in the harvested microbial mass and chicken body tissues. Again, you may benefit from reading the paper by Torrallardona et al 2003 (J Nutrition 133: 1127 - 1131). I have access to the papers - see attached.
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