Infrastructure in animal husbandry refers to fundamental facilities and services necessary for better living conditions of animals and its economy to function through better productivity. Mainly, infrastructure can be divided into two categories: hard infrastructure and soft infrastructure. Physical infrastructure, such as buildings, roads, and water supplying systems, belongs to hard infrastructure. Soft infrastructure includes services which are required to maintain economic, health, cultural and social standards of animal husbandry. Therefore, the proper management of infrastructure in animal husbandry is necessary for animal welfare and its economy. Among various technologies to improve the quality of infrastructure, non-thermal plasma (NTP) technology is an effectively applicable technology in different stages of animal husbandry. NTP is mainly helpful in maintaining better health conditions of animals in several ways via decontamination from microorganisms present in air, water, food, instruments and surfaces of animal farming systems. Furthermore, NTP is used in the treatment of waste water, vaccine production, wound healing in animals, odor-free ventilation, and packaging of animal food or animal products. This review summarizes the recent studies of NTP which can be related to the infrastructure in animal husbandry.
Animal husbandry, a component of modern agriculture, concerns with the animals that are raised for commodities such as meat, milk, eggs, fur, leather and wool. The well-being of animals in animal husbandry has ethical, scientific, political and aesthetic components which are required for a better animal management, welfare, handling, care and high productivity (1). Infrastructure is one of the major contributors to well-being of animals which usually associates with management issues regarding nutrition, health, transportation, mustering and handling and other special invasive practices (2). Infrastructure refers to the fundamental facilities in an animal husbandry which can be divided into hard infrastructure and soft infrastructure. Hard infrastructure includes systems such as buildings, roads, and water supplying systems. Soft infrastructure consists of cost-effective, health, social and cultural facilities. Therefore, the better management of infrastructure in animal husbandry leads to well-being of animals and higher financial profit through the higher productivity.
Non-thermal plasma (NTP) has been identified as a potential approach to improve the quality of infrastructure systems and facilities including buildings, medications, food, ventilation, water supply, instruments and other special management practices (3–7). NTP is partially ionized matters in gaseous state at low temperatures and energy is mostly stored in free electrons (8). Different devices have been introduced to generate NTP including dielectric barrier discharges (DBD), atmospheric plasma jets, coronas and, surface and microwave discharges for numerous applications in different fields (9). NTP is environment-friendly, free of toxicity and requires a low temperature. These characteristics of NTP do not put animals and environment in animal husbandry at risk (10,11). Therefore, NTP can be considered as an effective potential application to improve infrastructure, without disturbing animal well-being.
In this review, we summarized the already known applications of non-thermal plasma in the infrastructure sector of animal husbandry with regard to the well-being of animals and higher productivity which is necessary for its financially profitable function. We also highlighted the studies about the applications of NTP for improving infrastructure in other fields and hypothesized its use in animal husbandry. However, more systematic research is still required to bridge knowledge gaps particularly on NTP and the infrastructure of animal husbandry.
Role of NTP in Bio-decontamination to Provide a Healthy Environment for Farm Animals
The presence of various micro-organisms such as bacteria, biofilms, fungi, spores of fungi and protozoan parasites and their genes and metabolites in the environment increases the health risks to farm animals by causing and spreading numerous diseases (12,13). Therefore, bio-decontamination of surfaces, instruments and water is necessary in animal husbandry to maintain a healthy environment. Several methods have been introduced for this purpose including oven or autoclave sterilization processes, chemical sterilization such as ethylene oxide sterilization, Gamma irradiation, high hydrostatic pressure technique and microwave sterilization. The limitations of these techniques such as the possibility of chemicals to remain after sterilization, requirement of complex, expensive and high security equipment and the requirement of special conditions for operations have also been discussed (14,15). Therefore, NTP has been suggested as an effective, less toxic and low-cost method for bio-decontamination by several research groups. Also, none of the destructive effects on decontaminated surfaces were detected following NTP treatment (14,16,17). Furthermore, NTP can be used to decontaminate heat-sensitive surfaces and instruments as it is used at room temperature (18).
Commonly, most decontamination techniques target the membrane of a cell as it separates its inner compartments from the environment (14). NTP has general and specific effects on the cell surface of living organisms (14,19-21). In addition to cell membranes (14,22-26), NTP targets DNA (14,24,26,27) and proteins (14,26,28) to destroy living organisms (Table I).
Article from:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6689345/
EN 
DE 
JA 
FR 
KO 
ES 
RU 
ZH