This Research Topic welcomes original research papers investigating the effect of early-life interventions on overall productive efficiency and sustainability-related traits of poultry reared in either conventional or alternative systems or subjected to challenging conditions that might negatively affect productive efficiency.

In this Research Topic, we welcome the Original Research and Review Articles on the following aspects:

- Evaluation of early-life interventions prenatal and early postnatal in poultry and their effects on immune responses, gut integrity, gut microbiota, and growth performance.

- Use of in ovo technique as a tool for early-life programming.

- Validation of nutritional and environmental factors involved in early-life programming in poultry.

- Evaluation of early exposure to antibiotic alternatives (feed additives, probiotics, secondary plant metabolites, plant extracts, etc.) to reduce the detrimental effect of early exposure to pathogens.

- Evaluation of novel delivering approaches for nutrients and feed additives such as nanoencapsulation on early-life programming consequences.

- Effect of early exposure to environmental challenges and its long-term role in minimizing environmental and health effects.

- Effect of early-life interventions on expression patterns of different genes and epigenetic modifications through appropriate omics approaches.

Global food security will require increasing livestock and poultry productivity over the coming years while reducing the environmental effects. Therefore, enhancing the capability of animals to convert ingested feed into edible products by optimizing nutritional requirements and feed utilization is a critical step toward achieving sustainable poultry production. The term “early-life programming” refers to the way in which environmental factors, including nutrition, alter the course of fetal development, resulting in enduring modifications in the structure and function of biological systems. Early-life programming can have long-standing consequences: promoting growth performance, tolerance to harsh environmental conditions and enhancing the resistance to diseases in later life, including enteric infection and inflammation, immune dysfunction, metabolic disorders, and optimize overall production. It's worth noting that some strategic interventions in chickens' early life might be used to induce lasting beneficial changes in early development, expression patterns of different genes, and later phenotype and performance. These interventions include nutritional and environmental manipulation during the pre-and post-hatch periods.

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Frontiers in Veterinary Science

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