National Research Development Corporation

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A Rapid Cell-free Enzymatic Process for Feather Meal Production

The Know how offers a simple and novel process for feather meal production using native chicken feathers and common proteases in absence of any reductant. Feather meal is used as an animal feed due to its high protein content and also as a fertilizer for plants because of large amount of nitrogen present in the meal. Feathers constitute almost 90% or more pure keratin and are produced in burgeoning amounts as poultry waste every year. Therefore recycling of these wastes is a subject of interest. These waste feathers are currently used to produce feather meal through thermal processing whereby conditions of high temperature and pressure are employed. The feather meal produced by this method is depleted in its nutritional value due to loss of heat sensitive essential amino acids like lysine, methionine, tryptophan and causes formation of non-nutritive amino acids like lanthionine. Microbes are also used for degradation of native feathers. An ecofriendly cell-free enzymatic process has been developed for feather meal production without using reductant or live cells for feather recycling. The present enzymatic process comprises of autoclaving or boiling a plant product extract with feathers and incubating the extract with proteases for feather hydrolysis to obtain feather meal. Advantages It is cell free rapid single step process for feather degradation The present process involves a novel peptide source which renders reducing capacity to common proteases Complete elimination of the use of reductant like DTT, sodium sulphite, mercaptoetanol, glutathoine, cysteine and thioglycolate in the process The process eliminates the extra step of hydrolysate formation which is a must with plant sources. Thus the time for feather hydrolysis has been drastically reduced to 4-16 hrs Native feather can be used without any pretreatment Microbial, plant and animal proteases can be used for feather meal production Process does not require any pH control

TreatmentofFeathers

DriedFeatherMeal

For Further Details Kindly Contact: Dr. Ashish Kumar Srivastava Scientific Officer National Research Development Corporation (NRDC)
(An Enterprise of DSIR, Ministry of Science & Technology, Govt. of India) 20-22, Zamroodpur Community Centre, Kailash Colony Extension, New Delhi: 110048

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011-29240401-08 Extn. 219 011-29242409-10 9818995833 asrivastava@nrdc.in; asrivastava.nrdc@gmail.com http://nrdcindia.com