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113
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Introduction
Additional affiliations
December 2000 - present
Education
January 1994 - January 2000
Publications
Publications (113)
The influence of different amounts of oilseed cake (rapeseed and sunflower) on animal production parameters and fatty acid (FA) concentrations of the milk was studied in a Latxa dairy sheep experimental flock, both in winter (50% oilcakes; indoor feeding) and in spring (30% oilcakes; part-time grazing). The two different levels of the oilcakes test...
The objective of this study was to evaluate the effects of chitosan (CHI) supplementation on production performance and blood parameters in dairy ewes. Twenty-four multiparous Latxa dairy ewes at d 16 of lactation were divided into two groups of 12 ewes each. Ewes were fed one of two experimental concentrates (0.840 kg dry matter/d), control or sup...
Probiotics, prebiotics, and synbiotics have been proposed as safe additives in animal feeding. The purpose of this study was to assess the effect of supplementing corn-soybean diets of laying hens with dry whey powder (prebiotic), Pediococcus acidilactici (probiotic), and the combination of both (synbiotic) on the productive performance, egg qualit...
Cold-pressed sunflower cake (CPSC), by-product of oil-manufacturing, has high crude fat and linoleic acid concentrations, being a promising supplement to modulate rumen fatty acid (FA) profile. This trial studied CPSC effects on ruminal fermentation, biohydrogenation and the bacterial community in dairy cows. Ten cows were used in a crossover desig...
Spent coffee grounds (SCG), a by-product rich in polyphenols, can form part of enteric CH4 mitigation strategies while promoting the circular economy. This study aimed to evaluate the effect of 3 levels of SCG inclusion in the concentrate on enteric CH4 production, feed intake, apparent digestibility, ruminal fermentation pattern, microbial protein...
Grape stem is a winery by-product that it is currently disposed as waste or at best as soil conditioner. However, it is rich in fibres and polyphenols which makes it interesting for animal feeding. In this regard, rabbit farming emerges as a target livestock farming since fibre content is essential in rabbit’s diets for preventing digestive trouble...
This study aimed to expand the knowledge about the activity and mode of action of CHI on methanogenesis and rumen microbial populations in vivo. A total of 16 lactating dairy cows were distributed in two groups, one of them receiving 135 mg CHI/kg body weight daily. The effect on productive performance, milk composition, fermentation efficiency, me...
The Resilient Dairy Genome Project (RDGP) is an international large-scale applied research project that aims to generate genomic tools to breed more resilient dairy cows. In this context, improving feed efficiency and reducing greenhouse gases from dairy is a high priority. The inclusion of traits related to feed efficiency (e.g., dry matter intake...
Grape stems are a by-product of wine production which is managed as a waste. Animal feeding arises as a potential alternative. However, its practical use may be compromised by its high lignin content. In this sense, hydrolysis emerges as a strategy to increase fibre digestibility. In addition, due to its high and variable moisture content, it shoul...
La inclusión de caracteres relacionados con la eficiencia alimentaria es una de las prioridades de los
programas de mejora de vacuno de leche, debido a su impacto directo en la rentabilidad y la sostenibilidad
de las explotaciones. Su mejora produciría una reducción de los costes de alimentación (en
aumento y máximos, en la actualidad), del uso de...
Lignin in animal diets is a limiting factor due to its low digestibility. This study assessed the effects of thermal or mechanical pre-treatments and enzymatic hydrolysis on spent coffee grounds’ (SCG) nutritional value and digestibility. A first trial studied the effect of thermal pre-treatment and hydrolysis with removal of the liquid part and a...
This research aimed to evaluate the nutritional composition, in vitro digestibility, and gas production kinetics of 15 vegetable by-products generated by the agri-food industry compared with corn silage as a reference raw material. Nutritional characterization and in vitro ruminal fermentation tests were performed to determine in vitro organic matt...
Interest on methane emissions from livestock has increased in later years as it is an anthropogenic greenhouse gas with an important warming potential. The rumen microbiota has a large influence on the production of enteric methane. Animals harbour a second genome consisting of microbes, collectively referred to as the “microbiome”. The rumen micro...
Genetic selection is a promising approach to identify and breed lower-methane emitter animals. As a first step, this study aimed at estimating the genetic parameters of methane emission in Latxa breed using an experimental data set. For this, 295 methane concentration measurements were taken on 103 genotyped ewes, using a non-dispersive infrared me...
Mitigation of methane emissions from dairy cattle is a relevant strategy to reduce environmental impact from livestock as well as to increase farm profitability through improvement of energy usage. The objective of this study was to compare how microbiome composition determines methane concentration (MET) and methane intensity (MI, ppm CH4/kg Milk)...
We studied the effect of pre-natal supplementation with n-3 α-linolenic acid (ALA) combined with a tannin-rich forage on colostrum composition and immunological quality and whether these changes had advantageous effects on lambs’ survival and stress reaction to a post-weaning stressor. Forty-eight Latxa ewes were fed during the last five weeks of p...
Direct measurements of methane (CH4) from individual animals are difficult and expensive. Predictions based on proxies for CH4 are a viable alternative. Most prediction models are based on multiple linear regressions (MLR) and predictor variables that are not routinely available in commercial farms, such as dry matter intake (DMI) and diet composit...
Background:
Mitigating the effects of global warming has become the main challenge for humanity in recent decades. Livestock farming contributes to greenhouse gas emissions, with an important output of methane from enteric fermentation processes, mostly in ruminants. Because ruminal microbiota is directly involved in digestive fermentation process...
Background
Rumen microorganisms carry antimicrobial resistance genes which pose a threaten to animals and humans in a One Health context. In order to tackle the emergence of antimicrobial resistance it is vital to understand how they appear, their relationship with the host, how they behave as a whole in the ruminal ecosystem or how they spread to...
The aim of this trial was to assess the effect of feeding a concentrate including cold-pressed rapeseed cake (CPRC) on productive performance, milk quality and its sensory properties, ruminal biohydrogenation, and bacterial communities. Eighteen cows were paired, and two experimental diets (control vs. CPRC) were distributed within the pair. Concen...
This study was conducted to assess the influence of supplementing broiler diets with a commercial biochar on productive performance, pH of digestive organs, cecum short chain fatty acid (SCFA) profile and bacterial community. 720 one day-old male Ross 308 broilers were fed with the following diets at starter (1-21 days) and grower-finisher period (...
This research aimed to evaluate in vitro organic matter digestibility, fermentation characteristics and methane production of fruit and vegetable discards processed by solid state fermentation (SSF) by Rhizopus sp. Mixtures were composed of approximately 28% citric fruits, 35% other fruits and 37% vegetables. Fruit and vegetables were processed and...
Rumen microbiota has been previously related to phenotypic complex traits of relevance in dairy cattle. The joint analysis of the host's genetic background and its microbiota can be statistically modelled using similarity matrices between microorganism communities in the different hosts. Microbiota relationship matrices (K) enable considering the w...
The rumen is a complex microbial system of substantial importance in terms of greenhouse gas emissions and feed efficiency. This study proposes combining metagenomic and host genomic data for selective breeding of the cow hologenome toward reduced methane emissions. We analyzed nanopore long reads from the rumen metagenome of 437 Holstein cows from...
EU countries are the most important worldwide coffee consumers with about 2.52 million tons. Coffee processing and consumption lead to substantial amounts of residues, mainly coffee silver skin and spent coffee grounds (SCG) as follows: 1 kg of coffee generates around 2 kg of wet SCG. Around 46% of this total SCG generation is landfilled with the s...
Antimicrobial and antioxidant properties of spent coffee grounds (SCG) make them a potential ingredient in a diet for ruminants. This study investigated the effects of SCG on rumen microbiota. For 51 days, 36 dairy ewes were assigned to the experimental treatments (0, 30, 50, and 100 g SCG/kg). Ruminal samples were collected on day 50. DNA was extr...
Records of methane emissions from 1,501 cows on 14 commercial farms in 4 regions of Spain were collected from May 2018 to June 2019. Methane concentrations (MeC) were measured using a nondispersive infrared methane detector installed within the feed bin of the automatic milking system during 14- to 21-d periods. Rumination time (RT; min/d) was coll...
Context
Cold-pressed rapeseed cake is a by-product of biodiesel manufacturing that can be obtained on-farm after simple mechanical extraction of the oil. It has a high crude fat content and contains significant amounts of linoleic acid, which make it a promising lipid supplement to modulate meat fatty acid profile. However, previous studies have in...
The objective of the present study was to delineate the effect of different vegetable lipid supplements on apparent nutrients digestibility, nitrogen (N) metabolism and microbial protein synthesis in sheep reared under intensive conditions. Three Latxa sheep were used in a 3 × 3 Latin square design, with three 21-day periods (14-day adaptation and...
Spent coffee grounds (SCG) represent one of the main residues derived from restoration and hostelry. The aim of this study was to evaluate the effect of SCG, included in the concentrate at different concentrations (0, 30, 50 and 100 g/kg), on milk yield and quality, feeding behaviour, dry matter intake, apparent digestibility and ruminal short chai...
The advent of metagenomics in animal breeding poses the challenge of statistically modelling the relationship between the microbiome, the host genetics and relevant complex traits. A set of structural equation models (SEMs) of a recursive type within a Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) framework was proposed here to jointly analyse the host–metagenom...
Cold-pressed sunflower cake (CPSC) is a cheap by-product of oil-manufacturing. Supplementing diets with CPSC, rich in fat and linoleic acid, could be an effective tool for increasing healthy fatty acids (FA) in milk. To test this hypothesis, 10 cows were used in a crossover design with two experimental diets fed during two 63-day periods. Cows’ mil...
Context. Cold-pressed rapeseed cake is a by-product of biodiesel manufacturing which can be obtained on-farm after simple mechanical extraction of the oil. It has high crude fat content and contains significant amounts of linoleic acid, which make it a promising lipid supplement to modulate meat fatty acid profile. Previous studies, however, indica...
The aim of this trial was to study the agreement between the non-dispersive infrared methane analyzer (NDIR) method and the hand held laser methane detector (LMD). Methane (CH4) was measured simultaneously with the two devices totaling 164 paired measurements. The repeatability of the CH4 concentration was greater with the NDIR (0.42) than for the...
Diet has an essential influence in the establishment of the cecum microbial communities in poultry, so its supplementation with safe additives, such as probiotics, prebiotics, and synbiotics might improve animal health and performance. This study showed the ceca microbiome modulations of laying hens, after feeding with dry whey powder as prebiotics...
A lactation study was carried out utilizing 72 ewes in a 2 × 3 factorial arrangement involving two forages: Tall fescue (FES) and sainfoin (SAIN) hays; and 3 concentrates, which contained hydrogenated prilled palm fat (CTR), cold-pressed sunflower cake (SUN) or cold-pressed rapeseed cake (RPS) as fat sources. Ewes were divided into 6 equilibrated g...
El café es un producto básico importante en la economía mundial debido a su alto consumo en forma de bebida. Los posos de café (PC) son los residuos sólidos que se obtienen en los procesos de producción del café soluble y como resultado del consumo de bebida de café en hostelería, y suponen uno de los mayores residuos alimentarios anuales en todo e...
Background: Microbiome studies need to analyze massive sequencing data, which requires the use of sophisticated bioinformatics pipelines. Up to date, several tools are available, although the literature is scarce on studies that compare the performance of different bioinformatics pipelines on rumen microbiota when 16S rRNA amplicons are analyzed. T...
This study aimed to evaluate whether the host genotype exerts any genetic control on the microbiome composition of the rumen in cattle. Microbial DNA was extracted from 18 samples of ruminal content from 2 breeds (Holstein and Brown Swiss). Reads were processed using mothur (https://www.mothur.org/) in 16S and 18S rRNA gene-based analyses. Then, re...
In the Basque country and Galicia conditions, forage is usually conserved as silage, which accounts for a great part of cows winter rations. Robust techniques that predict the quality of forages for developing improved feeding strategies and screening of large number of forage samples are needed. In this sense, the gas production technique has prov...
In the basque country, in the spring, dairy ewes can spend a limited number of hours between 4 and 8 hours on pasture (Oregui et al., 1997). Besides grazing, ewes receive a supplementation of concentrates and forages in parlour. Therefore the characteristics of this supplementation are very important. In this sense, there is evidence that an increa...
Prebiotics and organic acids have been proposed as safe additives in poultry feeding to promote performance and health. The purpose of this study was to assess the influence of supplementing corn-soybean diets of broiler chickens with dry whey powder (WP), fat-coated calcium butyrate (CaB), and a mixture of both on apparent ileal digestibility (AID...
Dietary interventions are a common practice in the poultry industry to promote optimal performance and health of animals. Here, we aim at assessing the influence of supplementing broiler diets with dry whey powder (DWP) and whey protein concentrate (WPC) on nutrient coefficient of apparent ileal digestibility (CAID) and productive performance. Ceca...
The present study was conducted to investigate the effect of supplementing wheat-barley based diets with dry whey powder (DWP), chitosan (CHIT), a mixture of DWP-CHIT, and inulin (INU) on productive performance, duodenal histomorphometry and caeca microbial composition of chickens. A total of 1500 one-day-old male birds were allocated to floor pens...
Previous studies have revealed certain genetic control by the host over the microbiome composition, although in many species the host genetic link controlling microbial composition is yet unknown. This potential association is important in livestock to study all factors and interactions that rule the effect of the microbiome in complex traits. This...
The present study aimed to evaluate the effect of substituting high-linoleic cold-pressed rapeseed or sunflower cakes for palm fat on fatty acids biohydrogenation in an artificial rumen. Three isoproteic and isolipidic diets (forage : concentrate ratio 10 : 90) were evaluated. The three diets consisted of barley straw plus a concentrate mixture sup...
INTRODUCCIÓN La industria láctea europea genera más de 100 Millones de m 3 de lactosuero al año, que habitualmente se usa como ingre-diente alimentario, alimentación animal directa o se vierte a la red de saneamiento, con la consiguiente pérdida de nutrientes (proteínas, minerales, vitaminas, lactosa y grasa). En algunas regiones, como el País Vasc...
This study assessed the influence of reducing the crude protein (CP) content (from 190 to 130 g/kg CP/kg) in the supplementary concentrate and time allotment on pasture (TAP) on the milk yield, bodyweight, and the urinary nitrogen (N) and purine derivatives (PD) in lactating Latxa ewes. Animals were reared in a production system that restricted the...
The current study was conducted to explore the impact of inclusion of different types and levels of cold-pressed oilseed cakes on in vitro rumen fermentation and gas production parameters. Two batch fermentation trials (24 and 96 h) were conducted using the in vitro gas production technique. In each trial, three types of lipid sources [palm fat (PF...
The objective of this study was to assess the influence of the crude protein (CP) content (130 vs. 190 g CP kg-1) of the concentrate on milk yield and body reserves in a production system where ewes can spend a limited time on pasture. A total of 40 multiparous Latxa ewes were blocked into 4 groups on the basis of milk yield, number of days in lact...
Dairy sheep production systems in the Basque country are based on pasture utilisation in partial time grazing during spring. The aim of this study was to evaluate the effect of concentrate quantity and its administration pattern on standardized dairy milk yield (DMYs) and quality (% fat and crude protein), and on grazing time (GT) and live weight (...
A study was carried out to assess the effect of winter shearing on reproductive and lactation performance in the Latxa breed over a two year period. In each year two trials were performed: Trial 1 during late pregnancy and trial 2 during lactation. In trial 1 dry matter intake (DMI), body weight (BW), body condition score (BCS), litter size, and la...
This assay was carried out in order to evaluate the effect of the culture medium N content on gas production and on apparent organic matter digestibility prediction of grass silage. To carry out this experiment, 24 grass silage samples of known apparent organic matter digestibility were selected from the collection belonging to the Centro de Invest...
Because of the health-promoting effects of conjugated linoleic acid (CLA) isomers in humans, there is growing interest in increasing the content of C18:1 t11 in the rumen in order to enhance the final CLA level in ruminant milk and meat products. Modifying ruminal microflora populations has been viewed as a means to increase their C18:1 t11 content...
del contenido en nitrógeno del medio de incubación sobre la producción de gas y la predicción de la digestibilidad aparente de la materia orgánica de ensilados de hierba de hierba se incubaron con líquido ruminal tamponado con medio de cultivo suplementado o no con nitrógeno, y la producción de gas obtenida se ajustó a un modelo basado en la genera...
The objective of this study was to investigate the effects of chitosan (CHI) on ruminal and cecal fermentation and on apparent digestibility in sheep. In a first trial, 4 ruminally fistulated sheep fed an alfalfa hay and concentrate diet formulated to meet 1.2 times their maintenance energy requirements were assigned to 2 treatments [no-additive co...