Protease treatment of canola meal-containing Japanese quail diets: Effect on physiological parameters and meat quality traits

The utility of canola meal as protein source for quails may be limited by trypsin inhibitors that interfere with protein digestion. This study was, therefore, designed to assess the effect of including a heat-stable protease mono-enzyme (75'000 PROT/g; EC/IUB no. 3.4.21) in canola meal-containing diets on physiological and meat quality traits of adult female Japanese quails. A total of 240, five-week old quails (163.9 +/- 9.56g live-weight) were distributed into 30 replicate pens, to which five isocaloric and isonitrogenous diets were randomly allocated. The diets were: control diet (CON; a commercial grower mash with no canola meal (CM) inclusion); control diet in which 17.5% of soybean ingredients were replaced with CM (CM0), and CM0 diet treated with 0.01%, 0.02% or 0.03% of protease (CM01, CM02 and CM03, respectively). Quails were slaughtered at 10 weeks of age. There was no weekxdiet interaction effect on average weekly feed intake (AWFI), average weekly weight gain (AWG) and feed conversion efficiency (FCE). Protease inclusion had no effect on haemo-biochemical parameters, overall growth performance, internal organs, carcass characteristics, and meat quality parameters. It was concluded that inclusion of protease does not improve the utilization of CM-containing diets in adult female Japanese quails.