Evidence for an Unidentified Mineral Required by the Chick

Abstract

Several reports from this laboratory (Norris, 1954a, b; Scott et al., 1954) have indicated the existence of at least three unidentified growth factors required by the chick. The results presented in these reports demonstrated that a mixture of unidentified growth factor supplements consisting of 6% corn distillers’ dried solubles, 3% fish solubles, 3% grass juice, 3% dried whey product and 3% penicillin mycelium meal produced maximum growth in chicks when added to the purified basal diets used. It is the purpose of this report to show that a portion of the growth response obtained when this mixture is fed to chicks is due to an unknown mineral constituent(s) in the mixture.Although several experiments have been conducted, only the results of the first two experiments, in which the chicks used were the offspring of hens fed diets designed to produce progeny depleted in unidentified growth factors (Waibel, Morrison and Norris, …