Impact of Eimeria meleagrimitis and intermittent amprolium treatment on performance and the gut microbiome composition of Turkey poults.

VX did not affect performance during the pre-challenge period. At d23-29 (post-challenge), VX groups had significantly ( < 0.05) higher BWG than the PC group. Contacts and directs of VX groups in LS had significantly reduced compared to PC. As anticipated, amprolium treatment markedly reduced fecal and litter OPG for the VX + Amprol group compared to the VX group which did not receive amprolium. The ileal and cecal content results showed that the PC group had different bacterial diversity and structure, including alpha and beta diversity, compared to NC. Linear discriminant analysis Effect Size (LEfSe) identified that (ASV2) was enriched in PC's ileal and cecal content. Compared to NC and PC, the vaccinated groups showed no distinct clusters, but there were similarities in the ileal and cecal communities based on Bray-Curtis and Jaccard distances. In conclusion, these results indicate that vaccination with this strain of , with or without amprolium intervention, caused a very mild infection that induced protective immunity and challenge markedly affected both the ileal and cecal microbiome.