Alltech and the University of Kentucky created the Alltech-UK Nutrition Research Alliance in 2004 to explore challenges in animal agriculture, particularly poultry production, and to educate the next generation of agriculture scientists. This partnership has been incredibly productive for UK and Alltech, resulting in over 100 scientific abstracts and 13 journal articles.

One reason for the success of the alliance is the combined facilities that are available to the researchers. The UK Poultry Research Facility, located on UK?s Coldstream Farm provides facilities for conducting trials with layers, growers, broilers, and broiler breeders. Isolation chambers allow for the study of specific microorganisms and alternatives to antibiotic growth promoters. Metabolism cages are used to study nutrient digestibility and retention with the goal of determining requirements and bioavailability of different nutrient sources.

Animal nutrition studies have traditionally required large groups of animals fed specific diets over a long period of time. Measurable results were often limited to whole animal changes such as growth rate, production or performance. Alltech?s Centre for Animal Nutrigenomics and Applied Animal Nutrition provides microarray technology that allows the research team to assess how nutrients affect gene expression? examining thousands of genes at once. Nutrigenomics gives us the ability to understand nutrition at the molecular and cellular level.

In this short video Dr. James Pierce of Alltech describes the alliance and the 2010 annual report. For more information about the Alltech ? University of Kentucky Nutrition Research Alliance, please contact ColdstreamAlliance@alltech.com.