Poultry Studies 2015, Vol 12, Num, 2     (Pages: 023-027)

The effects of naked neck (Na) gene and sex on the apparent ileal Nitrogen and amino acids digestibility in Growing Meat Type Chicken

Abdulkarim Adulmageed Amad 1 ,Frank Liebert 2

1 Department of Animal production, Faculty of Agriculture and Veterinary Medicine, Thamar University, Dhamar, Yemen
2 Department of Animal Sciences, Division Animal Nutrition Physiology, Georg-August-University, Goettingen, Germany
- This experiment was conducted to investigate the effects of naked neck gen (Na) and sex (male and female) on the ileal nitrogen and amino acids digestibilties. Chicks were assigned to 4 treatment pens, 2 gene types (homozygous NaNa and heterozygous Nana, naked neck) and 2 sexes, containing 18 chicks each. Chicks in all treatments were fed the same diet. Results showed significant effect of the sex on the final live weight. Therefore, the male birds were 11.6% more heavily than females. On the other hand, neither the sex nor the gene showed significant effect on the gut length and organ weights (gizzard and liver). In addition, there were no significant effects of gene or sex on the ileal nitrogen and amino acids digestibilities, but the male birds had a numerically higher nitrogen and amino acid ileal digestibility compared with female birds and There were negligible differences in amino acid digestibility for birds with Nana gene compare with NaNa gene. However, more researches are required to confirm these results. Keywords : Naked Neck Gene, Sex, Live weight, Amino acid, Ileal digestibility