Achievements
Neil Jaworski received an award from the Nutrition Commission of the European Federation of Animal Science for "Best Oral Presentation" at the 2015 EAAP conference in Warsaw, Poland. His presentation was titled "Nonstarch polysaccharide composition influences the energy value of grains and co-products." Congratulations, Neil!
Personnel changes
Yanhong Liu left the lab at the end of October to take a faculty position at the University of California at Davis. We also said farewell to Carly Rundle, one of our student workers. We had a going-away party for Yanhong, Carly, and Trine (who will leave in November). Trine requested a Thanksgiving dinner theme, since she'll miss Thanksgiving, so we had turkey, mashed potatoes, sweet potatoes, pumpkin pie, and plenty of other good Thanksgiving food.
Lab activities
Diego Navarro finished a study of the effects of physicochemical characteristics of feed ingredients on the in vivo total tract digestibility of dry matter, energy, crude protein, and fiber.
Neil finished an experiment to quantify the degradation of fiber fractions from diets containing DDGS, wheat middlings, or soybean hulls along the intestinal tract of pigs, and to relate this information to the amount of digestible energy (DE) supplied by each diet.
Vanessa started a study of amino acid digestibility in conventional soybean meal and two sources of fermented soybean meal fed to weanling pigs.
Yue She started an experiment to determine effects of phytase on standardized total tract digestibility of calcium in milk co-products fed to growing pigs.
Travel and visitors
Dr. Stein gave a talk at the 28th Philsan Convention in Manila on Oct. 8 entitled "Co-products from the tropical food industry." He also visited Massey University in New Zealand on Oct. 21-22 to discuss collaborative research. On Oct. 26-28, he participated in the "Recent Advances in Animal Nutrition in Australia" conference at the University of New England in Armidale, New South Wales, Australia. His two presentations were entitled "Use of feed technology to improve the nutritional value of feed ingredients" and "Digestibility of calcium in feed ingredients and requirements for digestible calcium in weanling pigs."
Caroline gave a presentation on "Requerimientos de calcio digestible para cerdos de 25 a 50 kg" ("Digestible calcium requirements for 25-50 kg pigs") at the AMENA conference in Puerta Vallarta. There was a bit of extra excitement as Hurricane Patricia approached, but thankfully it missed Puerta Vallarta!
Dr. Chris Puls from Elanco visited on October 27 to give an informational presentation on Elanco and potential job opportunities.
Publications
González-Vega, J. C., C. L. Walk, and H. H. Stein. 2015. Effect of phytate, microbial phytase, fiber, and soybean oil on calculated values for apparent and standardized total tract digestibility of calcium and apparent total tract digestibility of phosphorus in fish meal fed to growing pigs. J. Anim. Sci. 93:4808-4818.