Improving Digestibility of Feather Meal by Steam Flash Explosion

Poultry feathers are available in large quantities. However, natural feathers have poor digestibility and are often considered as solid wastes. To improve the digestibility of poultry feathers, steam flash explosion (SFE) was applied to duck feathers at different pressures ranging from 0.5 to 2.5 MPa for 1 min. The pepsin digestibility, disulfide bond content, and major secondary structure component (β-sheets) of duck feathers before and after the process were examined. The results showed that SFE could effectively increase pepsin digestibility of feather meal. Under the optimal conditions (1.8 MPa for 1 min), the pepsin digestibility of exploded feather meal achieved approximately 91%, which was about 9 times higher than that of the original feathers. The pepsin digestibility was highly correlated with the degree of reduction of disulfide bonds (R(2) = 0.98) and slightly negatively correlated with β-sheet structure. SFE is an effective method to improve the bio-utilization of feather meal.