Partition of Amino Acid Requirements of Broilers between Maintenance and Growth. IV. Threonine and Glycine

Two experiments were conducted to subdivide threonine (exp. 1) and glycine (exp. 2) requirements of broilers into maintenance and growth requirements. Purified diets containing five graded levels of threonine (exp. 1) and glycine (exp. 2) were fed to growing chicks to estimate threonine (exp. 1) and glycine (exp. 2) requirements for growth and maintenance. A model developed to divide threonine requirement for maintenance from that for growth yielded a requirement for growth of 8.946 mg/g weight gain and 0.341 mg/mg N gain; the maintenance requirement was 0.033 or 0.030 mg per unit of metabolic body size $(Wg^{0.75})$. The plateau of plasma threonine concentration occurred at 279.4 mg threonine intake/day. The total threonine requirement was 289.1 mg/day or 0.69% of the diet, 294.1 mg/day or 0.71% of the diet based on weight gain and nitrogen gain responses, respectively. These estimates were in close agreement with previous estimates of threonine requirements. From the relationship of weight gain to N gain, 5.46% of the retained protein consisted of threonine; the reported threonine content of chick muscle was 4.02%. The glycine requirement for maintenance could not be determined due to failure to obtain data allowing extrapolation to zero response. However, ADG increased slightly up to 0.56% glycine.