Ruminal degradation of cell wall associated nitrogenous compounds of several super(15)N-labelled feeds

BACKGROUND Ruminal in situ effective degradability (ED) of dry matter (DM), neutral (NDF) and acid (ADF) detergent fibres, total-N and NDF (NDIN) and ADF (ADIN) bound-N in sunflower seed (SS), wheat grain (WG) and wheat straw (WS) were measured in three ruminally cannulated sheep, correcting microbial N-contamination using the super(15)N dilution technique modified to consider the super(15)N supply to adherent bacteria. RESULTS The lack of correction for N-contamination under-evaluated ED estimates in 1.52% (total-N), 28.0% (NDIN) and 33.3% (ADIN) in SS and in 1.02% (total-N) and 4.43% (NDIN) in WG. In the remaining cases, this contamination prevented establishing apparent degradation kinetics and, therefore, errors were not measured. Microbial corrected ED estimates in SS were higher in total-N (0.917) than in NDIN (0.559) and ADIN (0.520), which showed similar values. This behaviour was also shown in WS (0.670, 0.386 and 0.426, respectively), whereas decreasing values were shown from total-N (0.917) to NDIN (0.830) and ADIN (0.482) in WG. CONCLUSION Results confirm that NDF and ADF procedures failed to remove large fractions of particle adherent microorganisms, under-evaluating the ED of NDIN and ADIN. Degradation of NDIN represented a significant part of the degraded N, whereas ADIN contribution was only negligible in WG.