Effects of Dietary β-Mannanase Supplementation on Egg Quality during Storage

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to determine if adding β-mannanase to the diet can improve the quality of storage eggs from laying hens. Lightweight laying hens (36 weeks old), housed in cages with four birds each, were randomly assigned to one of two treatments: control group (diet without additives), or birds fed with 300 g/ton of β-mannanase. The experiment was carried out on a commercial farm (14 thousand birds). The study took 84 days to be completed, and each of its three productive phases lasted 28 days. On the final day of each phase, 125 eggs were randomly collected. The quality of the fresh eggs was assessed, and after each storage interval, the remaining eggs were kept and randomly divided to evaluate their quality (7, 14, 21, 28, 35, and 42 days). Analysis of variance was used to compare means considering differences at 5 and 10%. When compared to the control group, β-mannanase was able to prevent the loss of egg weight and albumen weight during storage (p p p p p p < 0.001). As a result, adding β-mannanase to laying hen diets is a successful method for enhancing egg quality.

Keywords

• dietary additives
• egg characteristics
• laying hen
• shelf life