Role of Fermentation in Improving Nutritional Quality of Soybean Meal - A Review

Soybean meal (SBM), a commonly used protein source for animal feed, contains anti-nutritional factors such as trypsin inhibitor, phytate, oligosaccharides among others, which limit its utilization. Microbial fermentation using bacteria or fungi has the capability to improve nutritional value of SBM by altering the native composition. Both submerged and solid state fermentation processes can be used for this purpose. Bacterial and fungal fermentations result in degradation of various anti-nutritional factors, an increase in amount of small-sized peptides and improved content of both essential and non-essential amino acids. However, the resulting fermented products vary in levels of nutritional components as the two species used for fermentation differ in their metabolic activities. Compared to SBM, feeding non-ruminants with fermented SBM has several beneficial effects including increased average daily gain, improved growth performance, better protein digestibility, decreased immunological reactivity and undesirable morphological changes like absence of granulated pinocytotic vacuoles.