Abstract
Annually, billions of tons of feather waste are discarded from poultry industries and the majority of these hard-to-degrade keratinized substrates are disposed of to landfill or incinerated, leading to consumption of energy and environmental pollution. However, keratin waste has a high protein content, but, due to its extremely slow degradation, this waste is neither lucrative nor eco-friendly. Physical and chemical treatments administered for the management of keratin waste cause the destruction of almost all essential amino acids, thereby reducing both the quality and digestibility of the protein. Thus there is an urgent need to develop a forward-looking environment-friendly method to tackle this problem. In spite of the resistant structure of keratin, keratinolytic microorganisms have great importance in the degradation of the tough insoluble keratin of feather and produce nutritious, cost-effective livestock feed. Thus keratinase-mediated microbial degradation of keratin plays a major role in the biodegradation of feather waste.
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