The Institute of Animal Nutrition commands a multitude of methods ranging from determination of diet ingredients or feed additives to molecular tools for the analysis on the cell level. In diets, minerals and trace elements, nutrient composition, vitamin concentration, amino acids or specific carbohydrates can be analyzed with precision. This enables the exact analysis of digestibility of main nutrients, but also specific use of feed proteins via amino acid analysis.

The analysis of bacterial metabolites, composition, and –activity of the intestinal microbiota are another focal point of laboratory analytics to better understand the impact of different diets on the complex events taking place in the gastrointestinal tract. Thus, it is imperative to constantly adapt and evolve molecular methods to be able to study the interactions between host and microbiota. For this, molecular methods including DNA/RNA extraction, hybridization techniques, q-PCR, rT-PCR as well as sequencing are being critically evaluated.