| An experiment was conducted using a total of 384 1-day old Arbor Acress male broiler chickens to investigate the effect of dietary chromium (Cr) on growth performance, immune functions, carcass quality, serum biochemical parameters and Fatty acid synthase(FAS) activity of broilers. Chickens were randomly allocated to eight treatments with six replicates of eight broilers each, and fed a basal corn-soybean meal diet containing 0.59 mg/kg Cr and the basal diets supplemented with 2.0, 4.0, 6.0, 8.0, 10.0, 12.0 or 14.0 mg/kg Cr as chromic chloride. The experiment was divided into two phase, 0-3 weeks and 4-6 weeks. The birds were fed ad libitum, and reared with 24 h in light. The results showed that dietary Cr affected (P<0.09) the thymus weight, T lymphocyte blastogenic response, serum uric acid concentrations, eviscerated percentage, abdomen fat percentage of 6-week old broiler and Avian Influenza (AI) antibody titer of 3-week old bird, and had no effect (P>0.10) on growth performance, FAS activity and other indices of carcass quality and immune functions. At the Cr level of 2.0mg/kg, the parameters of thymus weight(P<0.05), T lymphocyte blastogenic response(P<0.09), serum uric acid concentrations(P<0.08) and AI antibody titer(P<0.09)were increased, and the abdomen fat percentage(P<0.03) was decreased. The eviscerated percentage(P<0.04) were improved at the Cr level of 4.0mg/kg. The dietary Cr supplementation level had quadratic effect on ND and AI antibody titer of 3-week old broilers. Dierary Cr supplementation levels requird to obtain satisfactory ND and AI antibody titer were 6.74 and 6.15 mg/kg, respectively. |
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