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Abstract
1. The aim of the study was to investigate the effects of dietary threonine (Thr) and crude protein (CP) in maize–soybean meal based diets on the growth performance, carcase traits and meat composition of broiler chickens and to determine the dietary Thr requirement for optimum performance (weight gain and feed conversion efficiency (FCE)) at 0 to 3 weeks and 3 to 6 weeks of age.
2. Two basal diets that differed in CP (191·3 or 179·7 and 176·7 or 165·4 g/kg at 0 to 3 and 3 to 6 weeks, respectively) were formulated to have identical contents of Thr (6·0 and 5·4 g/kg), energy (12·97 and 13·39 MJ ME/kg) and other essential amino acids except for Gly + Ser. Basal diets were supplemented with l-Thr from 0·6 to 1·8 g/kg in 0·6 g/kg increments. Broiler chicks (540) were randomly allocated to 9 dietary treatments with 6 replicates of 10 (5 female, 5 male) chicks.
3. A significant interaction between dietary CP and Thr was found for feed intake, body weight (BW) gain and FCE. Increasing Thr supplementation improved feed intake, BW gain and FCE, especially in high CP diets in both feeding periods.
4. Incremental increases in dietary Thr increased breast yield at both CP levels and drumstick yield only on high CP diets. The proportion of thigh decreased with Thr concentration. Liver weight was significantly reduced by Thr supplementation; abdominal fat was not affected.
5. Estimated Thr requirements for FCE increased as dietary CP increased according to an exponential model. This model indicated higher Thr requirements than those of broken-line models for growth performance.
Acknowledgements
The authors wish to acknowledge Degussa-Hüls AG for funding to this project, supplying amino acids and doing amino acid analysis in feed and meat samples. We greatly appreciated the help of Drs Mesut Çetin, Johann Fickler, Stefan Mack, J. Fontaine and Mr Ìrfan Çoban. We thank Mrs Dilek Gökçeyrek for dry matter, fat and crude protein analyses in feed and meat samples.
