• Projects

    You can find basic information on our projects and research activities here.

  • News

    If yout want to know what is new in our lab, click this way.

  • Where you can see and meet us

    Here you fill find a list of conferences and seminars where we presented or will present our results in a near future. We will be happy to meet you there.

  • Laboratory strain collection

    If you are interested in bacterial strain from intestinal tract, mostly anaerobes from chickens and pigs, if you are interested in their basic metabolism or if you ant to perform BLAST against genomes of our bacteria, you are at the right place here.

  • Microbe gallery

    Bacteria can be amazing. Do not you believe? Try our gallery.

  • Miscellaneous

    If you still have not found what you were looking for, try to click here. You will see time-lapse videos how bacteria or phages grow. Or if you are uncertain on origin of particular bacterium, try to go this way as well.

 

Salmonella group at the VRI Brno is interested in structure and function of farm animal microbiota. Basic information on gut microbiota for broadest non-professional public can be found here. If you are professional in poultry production, the most important facts on chicken gut microbiota can be found here. And you work in research or academy, next level of information on chicken gut microbiota for your consideration can be found here.

Chickens and their microbiota represent the main target of our interest followed by pigs and their microbiota. For correct understanding of structure and function of gut microbiota we perform also comparative studied using samples from other animal species including humans.  This is why we analysed and compared gut microbiota of chickens, pigs, humans, cattle, horses, mice, dogs and even penguins from Antarctica. Identification of taxa present in a broad range of different hosts or host-adapted species helps in understanding spread and function of individual gut microbiota members. Excel file with data used for the figures below can be viewed here. Playing with this file will enable you to understand which genera are specific for particular host, or which genera dominate in one host but represent minority in another. Have a look and understand it yourselves, in your way of thinking. In additional two sheets you can see how different genera and the most abundant species are distributed in chickens and their environment in commercial production. If you want to understand how bacteria circulate between its host and environment, we indeed recommend to view since some of the outputs are surprising, counterintuitive, such as abundance of Lactobacilli in faecal microbiota of humans and dogs or which animals are common host of Campylobacter. At our web page, you can also download a list of strains which we obtain mostly from digestive tract of farm animals or their environment in pure cultures and which are available for joint projects. You can also visit and enjoy our microbe gallery. And since most of the obtained isolates we have characterised byt whole genome sequencing, you can BLAST our genomes with your gene or sequences of interest.

 

Welcome at our web pages and we believe that you will find useful information here. Who prefers videos, you can start here. If you want to see and meet us in action, you may click here.

For additional information, joint research proposals, contractual research etc, contact us at ivan.rychlik@vri.cz.

 

Influence of lincomycin-spectinomycin treatment on the outcome of Enterococcus cecorum infection and on the cecal microbiota in broilers

Enterococcus cecorum (EC) is one of the main reasons for skeletal disease in meat type chickens. Intervention strategies are still rare and focus mainly on early antibiotic treatment of the disease, although there are no data available concerning the effectivity of this procedure. The present study aimed to investigate the efficacy of early lincomycin-spectinomycin treatment […]

Protein expression in chicken ileum and caecum

It is clear that function of ileum and caecum is different. However, to answer a simple question how these two compartments of intestinal tract differ is not so simple. This why we addressed this topic and what we have found out, you can find in the following paper Volf_Animals.

Ecological adaptations and consequences for selection of novel types of probiotics

In this review we reminded characteristics of chicken gut anaerobes and related them to the probiotic potential of individual gut microbiota members. By comparison of already published data we proposed  that bacterial species from the intestinal tract which exhibit any form of adaptation to aerobic environment (spore forming bacteria, aerotollerant or facultative anaerobes) are less […]

Novel probiotic products are tested under field conditions

After extended testing under laboratory conditions and contained environment of experimental animal houses we moved towards verification of probiotic efficacy under real field conditions. Key for the success is the administration of strictly anaerobic cultures. This is why we test different approaches like administration via drinking water, fermented feer or spraying in hatcharies.