Today:
Adding whole grains to chicken food boosts meat production efficiency and could improve global food security. It’s also likely to be good for backyard chickens, says Sydney scientist Amy Moss.
Amy’s research at The University of Sydney’s Poultry Research Foundation showed that replacing some of the ground grain in chickens’ feed with whole grain both improved their digestion and how efficiently they produced meat.
Amy is available for interview and is presenting her research at the 29th Australian Poultry Science Symposium, which starts in Sydney on Monday 5 February.
She’s the NSW winner of Fresh Science 2017—our national competition helping early-career researchers find, and then share, their stories of discovery.
We’ll be sharing the other winners’ stories via this bulletin in the coming weeks.
On Friday:
Nobel Laureate Steven Chu launches new institute at UTS – 9.30 am Friday 2 February 2018, UTS Great Hall (Building 1).
Instant results at home, at the surgery, and at the bedside for every major medical test. That’s the vision for a new research institute at UTS.
They plan to use quantum dots and other nanotech to make small, inexpensive diagnostics as simple to use as a pregnancy test and as ubiquitous as smartphones.
And with their technology the human eye can now watch a single molecule at work inside a living cell.
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Give chickens whole grain and
feed 100 million people
Adding whole grains to chicken food boosts meat production efficiency and could improve global food security. It’s also likely to be good for backyard chickens, says Sydney scientist Amy Moss.
Amy’s research at the University of Sydney’s Poultry Research Foundation, found that replacing some of the ground grain in chickens’ feed with whole grain both improved their digestion, and how efficiently they produced meat.
Chicken is a staple of the Australian diet, it’s cheap and nutritious and is our most popular meat. According to a 2011 report from the Australian Chicken Meat Federation 90 per cent of us eat it at least once a week.
“These qualities also make poultry an impressive candidate for improving food security in developing countries,” says Amy. “Particularly if we can make meat production even more efficient.”
Chickens have a muscular organ called a gizzard in their digestive tract, which grinds the feed they eat so that it can be digested.
“We traditionally feed poultry pellets of finely ground ingredients,” says Amy. “Chickens fed these diets don’t use their gizzards and so these organs get very flabby.”
“If you add more whole grains to chickens’ diets their gizzards get a workout, and just like us when we work out, the gizzard gets more muscle.”
As the fitter gizzard grinds up the feed it stimulates gastric juices which leads to the chicken producing more meat per kilo of feed eaten.
“I found that by replacing 30 per cent of ground grain with whole grain the chickens produced 7.7 per cent more meat per kilo of feed eaten,” says Amy.
“And it also reduced the cost of milling and making the feed.”
“If more chickens around the world were fed whole grain, we could meet the protein requirements of roughly 114 million more people, equivalent to the population of Australia nearly five times over.”
Amy hasn’t tested her ideas on laying chickens but it’s likely that they’d also benefit from some whole grain in their diet.
Amy is presenting her research at the 29th Australian Poultry Science Symposium, which starts in Sydney on Monday 5 February.
Amy is currently a PhD candidate at the Poultry Research Foundation at the University of Sydney, where she is researching how to improve poultry performance through better nutrition. Amy’s research has been partially funded by the AgriFutures Australia Chicken Meat program.
Amy was the New South Wales winner of Fresh Science, a national program that helps early-career researchers find and share their stories of discovery.
In 2017 Fresh Science celebrated its 20th birthday, with 140 early-career researchers nominating for the five Fresh Science events held in Brisbane, Adelaide, Sydney, Melbourne, and Perth.
Fresh Science New South Wales was supported by New Scientist, the Australian Museum and the University of New South Wales.
For interview
Amy Moss Poultry Research Foundation, The University of Sydney, amy.moss@sydney.edu.au, (02) 9036 7751, 0490 147 735
Media contacts
Suzannah Lyons Science in Public (for Fresh Science), suzannah@scienceinpublic.com.au, (03) 9398 1416, 0409 689 543
Vivienne Reiner The University of Sydney, vivienne.reiner@sydney.edu.au, (02) 9351 2390, 0438 021 390
Nobel Laureate Steven Chu launches new institute at UTS
9.30 am Friday 2 February 2018, UTS Great Hall (Building 1).
Instant results at home, at the surgery, and at the bedside for every major medical test. That’s the vision for a new research institute at UTS.
They plan to use quantum dots and other nanotech to make small, inexpensive diagnostics as simple to use as a pregnancy test and as ubiquitous as smartphones.
Professor Dayong Jin, one of the winners of a Prime Minister’s Prizes for Science in 2017, will lead the Institute for Biomedical Materials and Devices.
Steven Chu is partnering with the Institute to create these new devices.
Professor Jin says:
“We’ve created:
• super dots that are the world’s brightest molecular probe for single molecule detection
• tau dots, which flash at different rates allowing information to be collected faster
• hyper dots that can respond to stimulation with optical, magnetic and chemical responses.
“We’ve created microscopes that can use these technologies to:
• watch the inner workings of our immune system
• see how bacteria become resistant to antibiotics
• find one cancer cell amongst millions of healthy cells.
“But we can, and must do, much more.
• we need to take these technologies to the next step.
• we need to turn them into devices that are small, stable, easy to use and inexpensive.
• we need to turn them into devices that can be built into smartphones.
• we need to reinvent diagnostic medicine so that every major medical test can give instant results at home, at the surgery, and at the bedside.”
UTS says, “The Institute for Biomedical Materials & Devices (IBMD) at UTS Faculty of Science is transforming advances in photonics and materials into revolutionary biomedical technologies. Working closely with researchers and R&D partners around the globe, IBMD is delivering interdisciplinary research in nanophotonics, nanomaterials, biomaterials engineering, point of care diagnostics technologies, and super resolution bio-imaging.”
For more information contact Marea Martlew, Marea.Martlew@uts.edu.au, 0424 735 255, (02) 9514 1766.
Or Niall Byrne, niall@scienceinpublic.com.au, 0417 131 977.
The human eye can now watch a single molecule at work inside a living cell
UTS researchers have created a technology that allows us to watch a single molecule at work through a standard microscope. The researchers labelled the molecule they wanted to track with ‘super dots’—non-toxic coloured nanoparticles—and showed that they could produce 4,000 photons per 100 milliseconds, which is his was visible to the human eye using a standard microscope.
This and other technologies developed at UTS will enable a new generation of research tools that can allow us to watch a cell become cancerous, or how a drug acts inside a single cell. It will also contribute to new fast, simple and inexpensive tools for diagnosis. The research was published in a new journal from Springer Nature, Light: Science and Applications.
The research was conducted at UTS Institute for Biomedical Materials and Devices (IBMD), a new institute to be launched 2 February 2018, and led by the paper’s lead author Dayong Jin.
For more information contact Marea Martlew, Marea.Martlew@uts.edu.au, 0424 735 255, (02) 9514-1766.
Or Niall Byrne, niall@scienceinpublic.com.au, 0417 131 977.