How to prevent chick culling in the poultry industry? Discovery of a new biomarker for in ovo gender screening

Chicken eggs are one of the most consumed foods worldwide. However, the practice of chicken culling in the poultry industry involves unnecessary animal suffering and finding a way to put an end to this has become a societal priority. One approach that has been propagated as acceptable is based on the selection of female eggs early in the incubation process and the devitalization of the male eggs. It is with this objective in mind that we searched for a biomarker for early gender screening in eggs. Applying an untargeted mass spectrometry approach, we profiled allantoic fluid of different day-old eggs and identified the feature 3-[(2-aminoethyl)sulfanyl]butanoic acid (ASBA) as a strong biomarker for in-ovo gender prediction for day-9 old embryos. After validation using LC-APCI-MRM with an internal standard, we found ASBA can predict the female gender with a sensitivity and specificity well above 95% in our experiments. HighlightsO_LIDiscovery of a biomarker of chicken embryo gender in allantoic fluid from eggs C_LIO_LIDay 9 after laying was determined as optimum for sex prediction and animal welfare C_LIO_LI3-[(2-aminoethyl)sulfanyl]butanoic acid was identified using mass spectrometry C_LIO_LIThe biomarker was validated on large cohorts of different chicken species C_LI Graphical abstract O_FIG O_LINKSMALLFIG WIDTH=200 HEIGHT=77 SRC="FIGDIR/small/551526v1_ufig1.gif" ALT="Figure 1"> View larger version (21K): org.highwire.dtl.DTLVardef@c1330borg.highwire.dtl.DTLVardef@1fe2f28org.highwire.dtl.DTLVardef@c9f245org.highwire.dtl.DTLVardef@40a5f5_HPS_FORMAT_FIGEXP M_FIG C_FIG