| Description: |
At hatch, 240 male broilers (Ross 308, Aviagen, Sallisaw, OK) were placed in batteries (Petersime Brood Unit, Gettysburg, OH) for a 15-d study to evaluate amino acid digestibility of soybean meal (SBM) from specialty variety soybeans grown in South Carolina. There were 10 replicates per treatment and 6 broilers per cage. Broilers were given a common corn and soybean meal-based diet from d 0 to 9. On d 9, broilers were weighed, and cages were allotted to 1 of 4 dietary treatments within location block. Dietary treatments consisted of 1 of 4 soybean sources varying in quality determined by crude protein (CP) content and processed into SBM. Two sources consisted of soybeans from a similar region and processed either commercially solvent extracted or experimentally solvent extracted at Texas A&M University. Therefore, dietary treatments consisted of a commercially processed SBM with 44% CP (CON) or experimentally processed SBM with 50% CP (PCON), 52% CP (52SBM), or 56% CP (56SBM). Assay diets were dextrose and SBM-based, formulated to supply 20% dietary CP with titanium dioxide as an indigestible marker. On d 15, broilers were euthanized by CO2inhalation and ileal samples were collected for determination of apparent ileal digestibility (AID) of AA. Data were analyzed using the GLIMMIX procedure in SAS v. 9.4 (SAS Institute Inc., Cary, NC), with pen as the experimental unit, pen location as the blocking factor and adjusted using Tukey-Kramer multiple comparisons. Broilers fed CON and 56SBM had increased (P |