Slide 1 Hi, I'm Ferdinando Almeida. I'm a Ph. D. student at the Hans Stein Monogastric Nutrition Laboratory, and today we will discuss about amino acid digestibility in camelina seeds and camelina expellers fed to growing pigs. Slide 2 This is the outline of this presentation. I will give a brief introduction about what camelina is and how it's processed and what the uses for these co-products are, and then we'll jump into materials and methods, results, a little bit of a discussion, and then some final conclusions. Slide 3 Camelina sativa is an oilseed from the Brassica family, and the growth cycle of this crop is about 80 to 100 days. It's normally planted in rotational systems, and normally in areas that would otherwise be uncultivated. The growth regions for camelina in the U.S. are primarily in Montana, Washington, South Dakota, and North Dakota. And as you can see from these pictures here, camelina seed is a very small seed. Slide 4 The processing of camelina -- we start with Camelina sativa, we start with the seed, and that seed is mechanically extracted, and then we have oil as our first co-product. That oil can be used for biodiesel production, and also it can be used for health and nutrition. And after the mechanical extraction, we also have the expellers left. These camelina expellers can be fed to dairy cows, poultry, or pigs. Slide 5 For the oil composition of camelina, it's a highly unsaturated oil, approximately 95% of unsaturation. From that 95%, approximately 65% are polyunsaturated fatty acids, and another 30% are monounsaturated fatty acids. There is also high concentration of omega-3 fatty acids in camelina. And as used for biodiesel, camelina has been used for the U.S. Air Force, U.S. Navy, and U.S. Army equipment because it has been shown that camelina oil can reduce carbon emissions by up to 70%. Slide 6 This table shows the nutrient composition of camelina seed and expellers. And so on the left column, we have some of these nutrients. We have crude protein, we have acid hydrolyzed ether extract, we have NDF, ash, we also have the glucosinolate concentration, and this is total glucosinolates, and also we have gross energy. So as we can see here, the seeds contain approximately 27% of crude protein, whereas the expellers contain approximately 33% of crude protein. For acid hydrolyzed ether extract, seeds contain approximately 39% of fat, and the expellers contain 15% of ether extract. Now, for NDF, we have 27% in the seeds, and 23% in the expellers. For ash, we have 4% in the seeds and 6% in the expellers. Glucosinolates is relatively constant between seeds and expellers, we have 9% for the seeds and 10% for the expellers. And gross energy is pretty high for the seeds, about 6,300 kcal/kg, whereas we have about 5,000 kcal/kg for the expellers. Slide 7 As we saw from the previous slide, there are some glucosinolates in camelina. And these glucosinolates may cause some toxic effects in animals, which have been associated with reduced performance. And FDA has approved use of camelina expellers in a concentration of less than 10% in diets fed to beef cattle, broiler chickens, and laying hens, and it is approved for use in pig diets up to 2% of the diet only. And this is primarily because of the lack of research that has been conducted using camelina as a feedstuff for livestock animals, and also because of these glucosinolates that are present in the expellers. Slide 8 As I said before, there is limited data on the use of camelina for pigs, and to date, no digestibility of crude protein or amino acids have been reported for pigs. And therefore, the objectives of this research were to determine the apparent ileal digestibility, or AID, and also the standardized ileal digestibility, or SID, of amino acids and crude protein and to compare these values with the AID and SID of canola meal, which is also an oilseed meal from the Brassica family. Slide 9 Now, let's look at the materials and methods. Slide 10 For this experiment, we used seven growing pigs with initial body weight of 43.5 kg. And these pigs were surgically equipped with a T-cannula in the distal ileum, and the cannula that we used is the one similar to this one in the picture. And pigs were placed in crates such as this one on the right, with fully slatted floor, equipped with a feeder and also with a water drinker nipple. Slide 11 Seven diets were formulated. Two diets contained camelina seeds, three diets contained camelina expellers, one diet contained canola meal, and in these diets, each ingredient was included at 40% as the only source of crude protein and amino acids. We also formulated a nitrogen-free diet that was used to determine the basal endogenous losses of crude protein and amino acids, and for this experiment, we did have FDA approval because of the high level of camelina that we were using in the diets. Pigs were fed two and a half times the estimated energy requirement for maintenance. Slide 12 Pigs were allotted to a 7x7 Latin square design, with seven diets and seven periods. Each period consisted of five day adaptation to the diet, followed by two days of ileal digesta collection, eight hours in each day. And data were analyzed using the mixed procedure of SAS. Diet was included in the model as the fixed effect, while pig and period were included as random effects. The LSMeans was used for mean calculation, and the PDIFF option was used for mean separations, with an alpha level of 0.05. Slide 13 Now, let's look at the results. Slide 14 Let me take a moment here to set up the graph. On the Y axis, we have standardized ileal digestibility in percent, and then each bar represents one of the ingredients that we were testing. So, the red bar represents one variety of camelina seed, the yellow bar represents a second variety of camelina seed, the purple bar represents one variety of camelina expellers, and the green bar represents a second variety of camelina expeller, the brown bar represents a third variety of camelina expeller, and the blue bar represents canola meal. So, all the slides for the results will be set up in the same way. And in this first here, we have the standardized ileal digestibility of lysine. And as we can see here, the SID of lysine was greater in canola meal than in the two sources of camelina seed. However, the SID of lysine in canola meal was not different from the SID of lysine in the three sources of camelina expellers. Slide 15 Now we are looking at the standardized ileal digestibility of threonine. And what we observed here is that the SID of threonine in canola meal was greater than the SID of threonine in the two sources of camelina seeds, but the SID of threonine in canola meal was not different from the SID of threonine in camelina expeller 1 in purple, and in camelina expeller 3 in brown. However, it was greater than the SID of threonine in the camelina expeller number 2, which is here represented in green. Slide 16 For the SID of tryptophan, we observed a similar pattern, in which the SID of tryptophan was greater for canola meal than for the two sources of camelina seeds, but it was not different from the SID of tryptophan in camelina expeller 1 or camelina expeller 3. But, the SID of tryptophan in canola meal was greater than the SID of tryptophan in camelina expeller 2. Slide 17 Now, we're showing results for the SID of cysteine. And here, we observed that the SID of cysteine in camelina seed 1 was less than the SID of cysteine in camelina seed 2, in camelina expeller 1, camelina expeller 3, and also less than the SID of cysteine in canola meal. However, it was not different from the SID of cysteine in camelina expeller 2. Slide 18 Now for the results of the standardized ileal digestibility of methionine. There were no differences in the SID of methionine between the camelina expeller 1, camelina expeller 3, or canola meal. However, the SID of methionine in camelina seed 1 was less than the SID of methionine in all other test ingredients. Slide 19 Now for the discussion. Slide 20 We observed that the values that we determined for the SID of crude protein and amino acids in canola meal, they are in agreement with previous data, and similar to other Brassica, we did observe that camelina contains glucosinolates. And the concentration of these glucosinolates, they may be affected by growth condition, because glucosinolates are synthesized from sulfur, and so depending on the concentration of sulfur in the soil in which each source of camelina was grown, that will affect the final concentration of glucosinolates. And that may explain some of the differences in the concentration that we observed among the sources that we used for this experiment. We also observed that other antinutritional factors are present in camelina. These are trypsin inhibitors and tannins, and these together, they may also affect the digestibility of crude protein and amino acids, so this is something we should be concerned about. And because camelina is a relatively new crop in the U.S., there is limited breeding programs, which may also explain some of the variation that we observed among cultivars. Slide 21 So we concluded from this experiment that the SID of crude protein and amino acids in camelina seeds is less than in camelina expellers and canola meal, and also that the SID of crude protein and amino acids in camelina expellers is comparable with canola meal. And therefore, camelina expellers may be used as an alternative feed ingredient. Also, we observed that the antinutritional factors in camelina products may limit its use in diets for pigs, and we also need to conduct more research to determine the energy and phosphorus digestibility, and also to determine the inclusion levels of camelina products in diets fed to pigs before we can actually use this ingredient in practical diets. Slide 22 I would like to acknowledge Evonik Industries for funding this project. Slide 23 And thank you very much for listening. And I hope you can visit our website to listen to other podcasts as well. Thank you.