Early-life feeding accelerates gut microbiome maturation in piglets

In this longitudinal study, we provided a customised fibrous diet to early-fed piglets (EF; 6 litters) from two days of age, intending to familiarise them with the consumption of solid feed and to investigate the impact on their gut microbiota compared to control piglets (CON; 4 litters) that did not receive pre-weaning solid feed and suckled sow milk exclusively. Rectal swabs were collected at multiple timepoints (pre-weaning: 2, 7, 15, 21, 28 days of age; post-weaning after 2, 5, 14 days) until six weeks of age (i.e., 2 weeks post-weaning) to investigate intestinal microbiota composition development over time using 16S rRNA gene profiling (n = 10 piglets per treatment). Overall, this study shows the importance of early-life nutritional strategies to influence the gut microbiota maturation in piglets.