Dietary Supplementation With Lily Bulb Core Extract Improves Feed Efficiency, Meat Quality, and Intestinal Health in...

Lily bulb core is an underused by-product of edible lily processing. We hypothesized that dietary supplementation with lily bulb core extract (BHX) would improve growth performance and meat quality and would be accompanied by changes in intestinal morphology, cecal fermentation, and microbiota. A total of 240 one-day-old male yellow-feathered broilers were assigned to four dietary treatments with six replicate cages of 10 birds each: a basal diet (CON) or the basal diet supplemented with 300, 600, or 900 mg/kg BHX for 53 days. All BHX treatments increased average daily gain over days 1-53, whereas 300 and 600 mg/kg reduced the feed conversion ratio compared with CON. Cooking loss in both breast and leg muscles was lower at 600 and 900 mg/kg than in CON. The duodenal villus-height-to-crypt-depth ratio was increased at 300 and 600 mg/kg. Cecal butyrate increased in all BHX groups and reached the highest concentration at 900 mg/kg. Overall alpha and beta diversity did not differ significantly among treatments, although selected bacterial genera differed among groups. BHX improved several production, meat-quality, and intestinal traits, with 600 mg/kg producing the most consistent overall response under the present experimental conditions.