Effect of processing of oilseed meals on the apparent ileal protein digestibility and performance in pigs

Abstract

Feed ingredients, e.g. oil seed by-products, generally have undergone several processing steps before inclusion in animal diets. Processing of feed ingredients and diets can result in conformational changes of protein structure, the formation of Maillard reaction products and cross-links between amino acids (Bender, 1972). These changes affect protein quality and the latter two reactions especially reduce the amount of the essential amino acid lysine (Mauron, 1990). The effects on protein quality may result in an impaired pig performance presumably related to a decrease in protein, amino acid and lysine digestibility as found for processed diets (Gonzalez-Vega et al., 2011). The aims of this research were to determine the effects of processing of two oil seed by-products, i.e. soybean meal (SBM) and rapeseed meal (RSM), on apparent ileal crude protein, amino acid and lysine digestibility and performance in growing pigs and to derive criteria to evaluate protein quality in heat treated ingredients. First results of ileal crude protein digestibility are presented here.