Hello. My name is Gloria Casas, and today, I am going to present one of the experiments that we have conducted to evaluate the nutritional value of rice coproducts. The title of this presentation is "The effects of full fat or defatted rice bran and microbial xylanase on growth performance of weanling pigs." Let's start describing what is rice bran. Rice bran is a rice coproduct that is produced in the rice milling process, when the bran layer from the brown rice is removed. This fraction contains the aleuronal layer, the pericarp, the embryo, and some fractions of the endosperm. When the oil is not removed the product is called full fat rice bran, but sometimes the oil is removed, and results in a product called defatted rice bran. The nutritional composition of the rice bran makes this ingredient an important source of energy and crude protein for pigs. This graph shows the percentage of crude protein and fat in these ingredients. The red bars represent full fat rice bran, and the blue bars represent defatted rice bran. We can see that the concentration of crude protein is approximately 15% in these coproducts, but the concentration of fat is 16% in full fat rice bran and just 2 or 3% in defatted rice bran. This graph shows the concentration of NDF in these coproducts, which is between 20 and 25%. The relatively high concentration of NDF in these ingredients is one of the factors that prevent greater concentrations of full fat rice bran or defatted rice bran in diets for weanling pigs. However, previous research has demonstrated that adding enzymes can improve the nutritional value, especially the concentration of metabolizable energy. Henderson in 2012 demonstrated that the full fat rice bran contained some bioactive components that can improve the immune response, specifically the concentration of immunoglobulin A in mice. And also, Herfel in 2013 demonstrated that the full fat rice bran may have a prebiotic effect. However, it's unknown if these effects can be reflected in the growth performance of the pigs. For that reason, we conducted one experiment to determine the effects of full fat rice bran and defatted rice bran on growth performance and blood characteristics of weanling pigs. In this experiment, we used 532 pigs that had 9.3 kg of body weight on average. These pigs were allotted in 14 treatments in a randomized complete block design with 4 blocks, 2 replicates per block, and 4 or 5 pigs per pen. Here, we have the experimental diets. All diets contained corn and soybean meal. The rice coproducts were added at the expense of corn at 10, 20, and 30% of inclusion level. All diets contained also 10% of whey powder and 3% of choice white grease. Calcium phosphate was added to the basal diet, but no additional source of phosphorus was added to the diets containing full fat rice bran or defatted rice bran. Seven additional diets also were formulated. These diets also contained 16,000 units of microbial xylanase. All diets contained 1500 units of phytase. Blood samples were collected from one pig per pen that was on the average weight of the pen. This sample was to measure BUN, total protein, and albumin. Also, we used ELISA kits to measure the concentration of TNF-α as an indicator of inflammatory response and prebiotic effect. We also measured immunoglobulin A as an indicator of immune response, and the concentration of Peptide YY as an indicator of homeostasis of feed intake and energy. Now, let's move on to the results of this experiment. Here I will show the results of the main effects of the enzyme, ingredient, and inclusion levels, because the interaction between these factors were not significant. This slide shows the effects of the xylanase on growth performance. The orange bar represents the performance of the pigs fed diets without xylanase, and the blue bar represents the pigs fed diets with xylanase. We can see that there was no effect of xylanase on growth performance parameters. That may be explained by the low inclusion level of full fat rice bran and defatted rice bran, that implies low concentration of substrate for the enzyme. There were no effects of xylanase on the blood characteristics or in TNF-α, immunoglobulin A, or PYY concentrations. Now, let's move on to the effects of the ingredients and inclusion levels. In this graph and the following slides, the orange bar represents parameters for pigs fed diets containing full fat rice bran, and the blue bar represents the parameters for pigs fed diets with defatted rice bran. We can see there was a significant linear effect to decrease the feed intake as the inclusion level of full fat rice bran increased. And also was a tendency to decrease the feed intake as the content of defatted rice bran increased on the diet. Also, the average daily feed intake was greater in pigs fed diets containing full fat rice than in pigs fed diets with defatted rice bran. For the average daily gain, there was a quadratic effect of inclusion level of the ingredient. The average daily gain increased at 20% but then decreased at 30%. Also, it's important to mention that the average daily gain at 30% was not different to the average daily gain for the basal diet. Similar results were observed by Warren and Farrell in 1990 and by Herfel in 2013. For gain:feed ratio, there was also a quadratic effect of full fat rice bran. There was no effect for increased inclusion level of defatted rice bran. But the gain:feed ratio was greater for pigs fed diets with full fat rice bran than for pigs fed diets with defatted rice bran. The concentration of BUN decreased as the inclusion level of full fat rice bran or defatted rice bran increased in the diets. And the concentration of BUN was greater in pigs fed diets with defatted rice bran than in pigs fed diets containing full fat rice bran. It can be explained by the reduction of the feed intake that we mentioned before. Also, we observed a linear tendency to decrease the concentration of TNF-α in pigs fed diets containing full fat rice bran. But no effects were observed in pigs fed diets with defatted rice bran. PYY is a peptide synthesized in the distal portion of small intestine in response to neuronal or nutritional stimuli and functions to regulate the feed intake and homeostasis of energy. In this experiment, the concentrations of PYY were in the range observed before for pigs fed ad libitum. Also, we observe a tendency to decrease the concentration as the inclusion level of the full fat rice bran increased in the diet. There were no effects of inclusion level of defatted rice bran. So from this experiment, we conclude that there was no effect of the addition of xylanase to the diets containing full fat rice bran or defatted rice bran on the variables that we tested. Also, we conclude that it's possible to include full fat rice bran or defatted rice bran at 20% of inclusion level in diets for weanling pigs without affecting the growth performance. Full fat rice bran may reduce the inflammatory response, but further research is needed to test that hypothesis. With this, I finish my presentation. Thank you for your attention, and if you need more information about this topic, you can visit our web site.