Transgenerational effects of paternal dietary Astragalus polysaccharides on spleen immunity of broilers.

Our previous study indicated that paternal dietary Astragalus polysaccharides (APS) could induce endotoxin tolerance-like response in jejunum of offspring chickens. There exist positive interaction between intestinal mucosal immunity and systemic immunity. So we studied the transgenerational effect and nutri-epigenetic role of paternal dietary APS on spleen immunity. 64 one-day-old Avein breeder cocks were used in a single-factor design with 0 and 10g/kg APS, respectively, 4 replicated cages each group, and 8 birds each cage. When the breeder cocks at 40-week-age, semen of cocks was collected and used for hatching experiment to get broiler chickens. The paternal dietary APS could transgenerational up-regulated the serum type-I-interferon level of offspring chickens. In spleen of breeder cocks, the dietary APS didn't have any systematic effect on genes transcription. Whereas, the paternal dietary APS supplementation could induce endotoxin tolerance-like immune response (TLR4 pathway) in spleen of broiler chickens. But the APS had no significant effect on transcription of ET related regulators and promotor methylation of core regulators (TRIF, MyD88, and SOCS1). This means that the paternal dietary APS can transgenerational induce endotoxin tolerance-like immune response in spleen, and the fundamental cause of the this response might lies on its effect on intestinal mucosal immunity.