| Abstract |
One of the major challenges in the management and animal welfare of the global poultry industry is that the young male chicks hatched on the first day must be eliminated because of no economic value. Therefore, the costs of sexing on the day-old chicks and culling the male chicks would increase the expense. Furthermore, sacrifice of near 7 million of male chicks every year causes a big issue of animal welfare. Due to the industrial requirement, this study aims to develop a non-invasive sexing technique to remove the male fertilized eggs in order to solve this problem. It has been reported that the metabolites during the embryonic development differ based on the gender of chicken embryos. We speculate that the difference of metabolites might result in various electrical conductivity and related impedance parameters, which might be detected by the electrodes attached to each egg shell at different positions to sex the embryos. Our preliminary study results showed that the impedance data collected from four electrode sets indicated significant difference between male and female chicken embryos incubated on Day 9. Therefore, the industrial application value of impedance spectroscopy on sexing chicken embryos would be further elucidated by evaluation on different strains of chicken. Additionally, detail analyses on physiological regulatory factors and changes of composition in egg during embryonic development would be conducted in this project in order to reveal the relationship of electrical characteristics and the development of chicken embryos. |
