Selection of Fungus Stains for Canola Meal Fermentation
Canola seed is now a popular alternative to soybeans for oil extraction. The canola oil industry has widely spread into Canada, Europe and Asia. Locally in Minnesota, canola seeds are processed to the scale of 100,000 bushel/year. One of the byproducts of canola oil refining is the canola meal, which can be processed further and sold as animal feed. There has been interest in replacing soybean meal with canola meal due to its overall higher protein content and improvements to quality in animal products and lower cost of raw materials compared to soybean meal. As different types of fungal have been discussed in related journals, three specific fungal strains are of concern in this project. Trichoderma reesei, capitalized as TR, is mainly tested to find its role in converting cellulose in canola meal into protein. HPLC test is done to compare the amount of amino acid and other contents before and after the fermentation. The project has proved that the fermentation is beneficial to the feed to increase the protein content so as to make the feed more nutritional, and the fungal chain which work best in the given period with the same amount of substrate is also found for different objectives.