Browsing by Author "Peltola, Antti"

Fertilizing of the fields with selenium has been an effective way to add organic selenium to the human and animal nutrition. Traditionally the additional selenium has been inorganic sodium selenite but nowadays there is also additional organic selenium available. This master theses has purpose to find out how additional amino acids and selenium from different sources effects to weight gain an feed efficiency of broilers as well as absorption of selenium to broilers breast muscle. The hypothesis was that diets with organic selenium decrease intake of the feed and improve feed efficiency and also increase selenium level in the breast mus-cle. Additionally restricting the level of additional amino acids would impair more absorption of the organic selenium that inorganic selenium. To this research two experiments were conducted. The first experiment was held between November 2nd and November 14th in 2012 and the second experiment was held between February 2nd and March 22nd in 2013. The first experiment was completely randomized feeding comparison of two different groups and the second experiment was completely randomized growth experiment of four different groups. In the first experiment there was compared the effects of two different source and level of selenium and in the second experiment there was added also two different level of additional amino acids. The first experiment lasted 42 days and the second experiment lasted 40 days. In the first experiment there was 240 and in the second 320 newly hatched Ross 508 roosters. The nestlings were divided in the first experiment to 24 group hatches of 10 birds and in the second experiment to 16 group hatches of twenty birds. In both experiments the feed intake was measured per hatch and the weight of the birds was measured individually at age of 0, 7, 20 and 33 but in calculations there was used weight average of the hatch. The organic selenium has no effect to weight gain, muscle gain, feed efficiency ratio nor the total weight of the broilers compared to inorganic selenium. Restricting the amount of the amino acids did impair the daily gain and feed efficiency ratio. There was not observed interaction of amino acids and organic selenium. Source of the selenium has no effect to selenium absorption but restricting amount of amino acids did impair the absorption. Larger selenium dosage increased the amount of selenium in the breast muscle.