Chronic immune system activation increases the growing pig's requirement for sulphur amino acids

A mild disease challenge as commonly occurs in commercial production facilities may significantly decrease performance by redirecting (partitioning) amino acids from body protein synthesis to immune activation. The amino acids that are used by the pig for synthesis of immune molecules may, therefore, be in short supply and hence may limit body protein deposition. Sulphur amino acids (SAA), especially cysteine, are the most abundantly used amino acids for synthesis of immune molecules (Rakhshandeh et al., 2010). The experiment reported here was conducted to test the hypothesis that pigs whose immune system has been activated will respond to higher SAA levels than those without chronic immune system activation