THE USE OF PROPLEX DY IN AQUACULTURE DIETS, AN OVERVIEW OF EXISTING LITERATURE

The use of alternative protein sources to replace fishmeal and highly variable protein sources in aquafeeds has been an area of active research for the aquaculture industry.  Over the past 10 years, ADM has developed a vegetarian source aquaculture feed ingredient, PROPLEX DY.  Research has been conducted in several aquatic and terrestrial species, demonstrating utility as a quality protein source in a wide variety of applications.  Previous work on this ingredient has been published using various product names, and, therefore, the objective is to unify the results for PROPLEX DY. PROPLEX DY is a yeast (saccharomyces cerevisiae) yeast separated from the wet milling production of ethanol.  In this process corn enters a human food production facility and is separated into fiber, protein and starch fractions.  The starch is saccharified into dextrose which is used to feed the saccharomyces yeast in an ethanol fermentation.  The yeast is then separated and dried producing a high quality feed ingredient. It has been evaluated as a protein ingredient in trials with shrimp, salmon, hybrid striped bass, red drum, and trout. Inclusion levels vary slightly across species, but PROPLEX DY has been successfully incorporated into all species tested at 10% of the diet without reducing growth performance. Pond raised Pacific white shrimp were fed 0, 5, 10, and 15% of PROPLEX DY as a protein replacement for 16 weeks and no differences in growth (Achupallas et al., 2016) were observed. PROPLEX DY was successfully included in diets for hybrid striped bass between 7.5 and 15% of the diet (Gause and Trushenski, 2011a). Salmon have been fed diets with PROPLEX DY included at 5, 10, and 15% of the diet (Burr, 2016). Growth performance was maintained across treatments, indicating that salmon can utilize PROPLEX DY as a source of protein. In trout, PROPLEX DY has been successfully included as a protein source up to 15% of the diet both in plant-based diets and also as a partial replacement to fish meal (Hauptman et al., 2014). PROPLEX DY is an excellent source of protein for the aquaculture industry, and results indicate that PROPLEX DY can be incorporated into the diets of shrimp, salmon, hybrid striped bass, red drum, and trout up to 15% as a suitable replacement to existing protein ingredients.