Digestible amino acids: Significance and prospects in poultry

Abstract

Amino acids (AA) are protein's hydrolytic products. In the recent years, poultry diets are being formulated on digestible AA (DAA) basis rather than total AA. Different techniques including precision-fed rooster assay, precision-fed cecectomized rooster assay, ileal AA digestibility and precision-fed broiler chick assay are used to determine the DAA coefficients of feed ingredients. However, nutritionists consider that the ileal digestibility in growing and adult birds is more accurate than other techniques. In all these digestibility techniques, apparent AA digestibility is corrected for endogenous AA losses to achieve standardized AA digestibility values. The digestibility values, determined using different digestibility techniques, of any feed ingredient vary. This variation in digestibility values can be minimized by adopting same digestibility technique for the estimation of DAA coefficients. Birds fed diets formulated on DAA basis resulted in better growth performance, feed efficiency and production economics. The main objective of this review is to examine the poultry's performance fed diet formulated based on the DAA.