Preparation of protein products from underutilized fish Pterygoplichthys pardalis and its potential application in poultry feed industries

Abstract

newline To address the demands of growing population and malnutrition issues, extensive care was taken towards the research in agriculture sector and poultry industry. Increased consumption of poultry meat and other poultry products has been observed consistently over the last few decades and this trend is going to continue globally in the near future also. The demand for poultry products on the other hand leads to an increased demand for feed and raw materials for the poultry. Among the traditional feed ingredients viz., soybean meal, maize, fish meal and meat meal, fish meal was predominantly used as animal feed owing to its high essential amino acid content. Usage of fish meal as feed has been practiced from long time but employment of fish hydrolysate and collagen as feed supplements is a novel idea. Hence, the objectives of the present work were formulated in such a way that the fish hydrolysate and collagen were extracted from the waste fish Pterygoplichthys pardalis and the extracted products are used as diet supplements to enhance the body weight and growth rate of chicken. newlineThe first objective of the present work deals with the extraction of fish hydrolysate from various parts of the fish including skin, viscera, muscles and bones through enzymatic hydrolysis. Upon analyzing the proximate content of these fish parts, skin was found to contain more protein content than the rest. Thus, the fish skin was taken, processed to obtain protein hydrolysate and was packed in LDPE sachets. The biological parameters of the protein hydrolysate as well as its stability were studied for 6 months. The protein hydrolysate was found to be stable without any growth of E coli, Salmonella and Vibrio upto 6 months. Besides, amino acid composition estimation using HPLC disclosed the presence of high lysine (15%), proline (13.5%) and histidine (9.7%) contents. The usage of protein hydrolysate as feed reflects the cumulative effect of group of proteins on the growth of the animal.