Monomodular and multifunctional processive endocellulases: implications for swine nutrition and gut microbiome

Ming Z Fan; Laurence Cheng; Min Wang; Jiali Chen; Wenyi Fan; Fatmira Jashari; Weijun Wang

doi:10.1186/s42523-024-00292-w

Monomodular and multifunctional processive endocellulases: implications for swine nutrition and gut microbiome

Anim Microbiome. 2024 Feb 2;6(1):4. doi: 10.1186/s42523-024-00292-w.

Authors

Ming Z Fan^{1

2}, Laurence Cheng³, Min Wang³, Jiali Chen³, Wenyi Fan^{3

4}, Fatmira Jashari^{3

5}, Weijun Wang^{3

6}

Affiliations

¹ Department of Animal Biosciences, University of Guelph, N1G 2W1, Guelph, ON, Canada. mfan@uoguelph.ca.
² One Health Institute, University of Guelph, N1G 2W1, Guelph, ON, Canada. mfan@uoguelph.ca.
³ Department of Animal Biosciences, University of Guelph, N1G 2W1, Guelph, ON, Canada.
⁴ Transpharmation LTD, N1M 2W3, Fergus, ON, Canada.
⁵ Department of Human Health and Nutritional Sciences, University of Guelph, N1G 2W1, Guelph, ON, Canada.
⁶ The Canadian Food Inspection Agency Ontario Operation, N1G 4S9, Guelph, ON, Canada.

Abstract

Poor efficiency of dietary fibre utilization not only limits global pork production profit margin but also adversely affects utilization of various dietary nutrients. Poor efficiency of dietary nutrient utilization further leads to excessive excretion of swine manure nutrients and results in environmental impacts of emission of major greenhouse gases (GHG), odor, nitrate leaching and surface-water eutrophication. Emission of the major GHG from intensive pork production contributes to global warming and deteriorates heat stress to pigs in tropical and sub-tropical swine production. Exogenous fibre enzymes of various microbial cellulases, hemicellulases and pectinases have been well studied and used in swine production as the non-nutritive gut modifier feed enzyme additives in the past over two decades. These research efforts have aimed to improve growth performance, nutrient utilization, intestinal fermentation as well as gut physiology, microbiome and health via complementing the porcine gut symbiotic microbial fibrolytic activities towards dietary fibre degradation. The widely reported exogenous fibre enzymes include the singular use of respective cellulases, hemicellulases and pectinases as well as their multienzyme cocktails. The currently applied exogenous fibre enzymes are largely limited by their inconsistent in vivo efficacy likely due to their less defined enzyme stability and limited biochemical property. More recently characterized monomodular, multifunctional and processive endoglucanases have the potential to be more efficaciously used as the next-generation designer fibre biocatalysts. These newly emerging multifunctional and processive endoglucanases have the potential to unleash dietary fibre sugar constituents as metabolic fuels and prebiotics, to optimize gut microbiome, to maintain gut permeability and to enhance performance in pigs under a challenged environment as well as to parallelly unlock biomass to manufacture biofuels and biomaterials.

Keywords: Biomass; Fibre enzyme; Gut microbiome; Gut permeability; Pig; Prebiotic.

Publication types

Review