Ruminal Protein Degradation Characteristics of Cell Mass from Lysine Production

Chemical analysis and in vitro studies were conducted to investigate the nutritive value for ruminants of cell mass from lysine production (CMLP) which is a by-product of the lysine manufacturing process. Proximate analysis, protein fractionation, and in vitro protein degradation using protease from Streptomyces griseus and strained ruminal fluid were carried out to estimate ruminal protein degradability of CMLP with two reference feedstuffs-soybean meal (SBM) and fish meal (FM). Amino acid composition and pepsin-HCl degradability were also determined to evaluate postruminal availability. CMLP contained 67.8% crude protein with a major portion being soluble form (45.4% CP) which was composed of mainly ammonium nitrogen (81.8% soluble CP). The amount of nucleic acids was low (1.15% DM). The total amount of amino acids contained in CMLP was 40.60% DM, which was lower than SBM (47.69% DM) or FM (54.08% DM). CMLP was composed of mainly fraction A and fraction B2, while the protein fraction in SBM was mostly B2 and FM contained high proportions of B2 and B3 fractions. The proportion of B3 fraction, slowly degradable protein, in CP was the highest in fish meal (23.34%), followed by CMLP (7.68%) and SBM (1.46%). CMLP was degraded up to 51.40% at 18 h of incubation with Streptomyces protease, which was low compared to FM (55.23%) and SBM (83.01%). This may be due to the insoluble portion of CMLP protein being hardly degradable by the protease. The in vitro fermentation by strained ruminal fluid showed that the amount of soluble fraction was larger in CMLP (40.6%) than in SBM (17.8%). However, because the degradation rate constant of the potentially degradable fraction of CMLP (2.0%/h) was lower than that of SBM (5.8%/h), the effective ruminal protein degradability of CMLP (46.95%) was slightly lower than SBM (53.77%). Unavailable fraction in the rumen was higher in CMLP (34.0%) compared to SBM (8.8%). In vitro CP degradability of CMLP by pepsin was 80.37%, which was lower than SBM (94.42%) and FM (89.04%). The evaluation of protein degradability using different approaches indicated that soluble protein in CMLP may supply a large amount of ammonia in the rumen while insoluble protein can be by-passed from microbial attacks due to its low degradability. The results from this study suggest that CMLP can be used as a protein supplement to ruminants for supplying both non-protein nitrogen to rumen microbes and rumen undegradable protein to the host animal.