Optimize overall digestibility of the feed to capture its nutritive full value

1. Feedase: from the indigestible fraction to the global feed enzyme approach

Providing insights into the indigestible components such as phytate and dietary fiber and their interaction in poultry feeds is key for capturing the full value of exogenous enzymes. In order to estimate the potential of enzymes in animal diets, nutritionists must first know what fraction of nutrients is not digested and present antinutritional properties. As exogenous enzymes aim at releasing part of non-digestible components into digestible nutrients, knowing the amount of non-digestible nutrients help to evaluate the potential of such enzyme response. Considering several exogenous enzymes as a unique enzyme solution, which breakdown the antinutritional fraction and releases nutrients from it, has demonstrated to be the best way to evaluate the feed digestibility improvement. This vision is described as the feedase approach. Feedase is about considering the whole feed for a global enzymatic solution, resulting in an improvement of digestibility of all nutrients, including fat, starch, proteins, phosphorus, etc… With this new approach, the enzyme effect is linked to a specific substrate, but enzyme effect is associated with indirect effect on nutrients (i.e. fat, starch, proteins, phosphorus) to the complementary actions of enzymes.