Influence of Adding Synthetic Lysine in Corn-Soy Diets for Commercial Leghorns

Abstract

An experiment was conducted as a 2 x 5 factorial to determine if increasing dietary lysine in corn-soy diets formulated based on lysine improves egg weight (EW) and egg production (EP) in commercial Leghorns. A set of five corn-soy diets with similar levels of energy were formulated based on lysine to contain 0.97, 0.92, 0.87, 0.83 and 0.79% lysine. These diets contained no synthetic lysine. A second set of five diets were formulated by supplementing 0.097% synthetic lysine to each diet in the first set. Hy-Line W36 hens (n=1,280; 21 wk of age) were randomly assigned in replicates of 16 hens to the ten dietary treatments for 16 weeks. Feed consumption (FC), EP, EW and egg specific gravity (ESG) were measured. Adding synthetic lysine to diets formulated based on lysine had no significant effect on EP, EW, ESG or FC of hens. Also, amino acid density had no effect (P > 0.05) on EP, FC, or ESG. However, EW linearly increased (P < 0.01) as amino acid density increased. These results indicate that adding 0.097% additional synthetic lysine to corn-soy diets formulated based on lysine containing 0.79 to 0.97% lysine had no significant influence on performance of commercial Leghorns.