Potential of fructooligosaccharide prebiotics in alternative and nonconventional poultry production systems

otics are carbohydrate-based polymers derived from natural sources that can be utilized by certain gas-trointestinal tract bacteria but not by the host animal. They are attractive as feed additives for non-conventional poultry production systems because they select for beneficial microorganisms that are thought to promote nutritional benefits to the bird and poten-tially limit foodborne pathogen establishment. There have been numerous studies conducted with prebiotic supplements to assess their impact in humans, ani-mals, and conventionally raised poultry but only lim-ited research has been conducted with birds grown under nonconventional production conditions. Much remains unknown about the specific mechanism(s) as-sociated with their impact on the host as well as the gastrointestinal tract microflora. Utilization of several recently developed approaches such as microbiome and metabolomic analyses should offer more insight on how dietary prebiotic additives influence the development of the gastrointestinal tract microbiota and these sub-sequent changes correspond with alterations in a bird’s physiology as it matures. As more detailed and pre-cise studies are done with nonconventional poultry, it is likely that structurally distinct prebiotics will influ-ence not only the gastrointestinal tract microbiota dif-ferently, but potentially interact directly and/or indi-rectly with the bird host in distinguishable patterns as well. These functions will be important to delin-eate if further applications are to be developed for spe-cific prebiotics in nonconventional poultry production systems