Castor bean meal(CBM) is well known for its toxicity functions due to the presence of ricin protein and other castor plant based metabolites.A classical but a productive research study from the Rutgers University,USA revealed a complete, strange fact about castor bean cake.Researchers Laufey Vilhjalmsdottir and Hans Fischer have chosen CBM and treated it with warm water to exclude its toxic debris materials.They later fed the processed material to the bred chicks as a test proteinaceous diet to assess an increase in biomass and were able to notice not alone a loss of toxicity from the fed material but also an incrementation in the mass development of experiemental subjects which enabled scientists to understand the scope of CBM as a potent future, feedstock in poultry.The results also revealed that CBM has to be supplemented along with some essential amino acids to achieve a superior activity in chicks which otherwise proved to be inferior performing to soybean diet.
In this analytical study, scientists were able to prove the efficacy of the deoiled cake from castor but the experimental robustness with appropriate controls and parameters are necessary to confirm the compatibility of CBM as a routine feed for the poultry and other livestocks.
For further study:http://jn.nutrition.org/content/101/9/1185.full.pdf