Evaluating the efficacy of xylanase supplementation in wheat-added diets

Wheat could be a good energy source but it contains the anti-nutritional factor arabinoxylan. High molecular weight encapsulates nutrients and inhibits nutrient absorption and digestion by increasing the viscosity of digesta. The use of the enzyme xylanase could degrade the polysaccharide xylan into xylose. However, there is a physiological limitation in the capacity of monogastric to produce xylanases because they can only be secreted by fungi, bacteria, and yeast. Therefore the current experiment was conducted to evaluate the efficacy of xylanase in the wheat added diets fed to broilers. A total of 280 ROSS broilers were randomly allotted to 5 dietary treatments with 8 replicates per treatment. All the diets were corn-soybean based and were formulated to meet or exceed the ROSS specification with different wheat levels of 0%, 2%, 4%, and 8% with xylanase while the other nutritional values were the same. Growth performance, digestibility, and viscosity of ileal contents were measured to estimate the effect of xylanase. Results suggest xylanase in diets doesn’t affect the growth performance and carcass traits. However, digesta taken from the bird fed higher wheat with xylanase diet showed a lower viscosity. In conclusion, the addition of xylanase in wheat-added diets could improve nutrient digestibility by reducing the viscosity of digesta. We suggest the evaluation of the xylanase effect in energy-reduced or protein-reduced diets in the future.