Sea Cucumber Viscera Hydrolysate as a Potential Animal Feed Supplement

Abstract

Among the seafood items, Sea Cucumbers are one of those popular seafood products in the Chinese community, fetching with reasonable high pricing. A major issue with Sea Cucumber is the waste generated up to 30-40% waste. Sea Cucumber internal Organs (SCiO) and washed water, containing soluble components usually discarded as waste in the industry has considerable amount of nutritional components. A preliminary study by Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia (UKM) research team recently discovered that, on dry weight basis, the SCiO contains 50.27% and 22.16% of protein and fat contents respectively. Amino Acids Profile (AAP), Fatty Acids Profile (FAP), soluble minerals and peptides of the various components obtained from the processing steps, i.e., hydrolysis, filtration, membrane separation, concentration and finally spray drying and/or freeze-drying of the SCiO were determined. Overall, SCiO contains all the 9 essential amino acids, which corresponds to 36.65 ± 0.06 % of the total amino acids. Aside from that, the SCiO oil contains 39.76 ± 0.29 % saturated fatty acids, 26.86 ± 0.01 % monounsaturated fatty acids, and 33.39 ± 0.28 % polyunsaturated fatty acids. Interestingly, the Omega-3 eicosapentaenoic acid (EPA) (C20:5n3), an essential fatty acid, was found to be the major fatty acid of SCiO hydrolysates, amounting to 27.60 ± 0.14 % of total oil content. This corresponds to approximately 6.5-7.2% of the SCiO hydrolysates being EPA, which is high and valuable, especially coming from a waste material. Thus, there is a huge potential to recover these functional components, together with the other potential functional properties, from the SCiO hydrolysate that may contribute as animal nutritional feed supplement.