Enspira (ESP) and Enspira+ (ESP+) are precision engineered blends of exogenous enzymes designed to degrade non-starch polysaccharides in common diet formulations. An experiment was conducted to determine the responses of the ileal digestible energy (IDE), apparent metabolizable energy (AME), and N corrected AME (AMEn) of soybean meal (SBM) to ESP or ESP+ inclusion. Cobb-500 male broiler chickens were obtained and fed a corn-SBM-based starter diet. At 20 d of age birds were individually weighed and 288 birds were allotted to 6 dietary treatments (6 birds/cage) in a randomized complete block design. Three corn-canola meal-based reference diets were created. One contained no enzymes and each of the other 2 contained 125 mg/kg of either ESP or ESP+. Then, 3 test diets were created by adding 150 g/kg SBM to each of the reference diets at the proportional expense of all energy contributing ingredients, producing 3 pairs of diets (control, ESP, ESP+). Experimental diets were fed from d 20 to 25 and excreta collected from d 23 to 25. At d 25, birds were euthanized and digesta collected from the terminal two-thirds of the ileum. Feed, digesta, and excreta samples were dried and analyzed for dry matter (DM), N, Ti, and gross energy (GE) content. Energy values were calculated using a difference method. Data were subjected to an ANOVA and contrasts were used to compare the effect of the enzymes with and with SBM. The addition of 150 g/kg SBM reduced the metabolizability of GE (P < 0.05) and N (P < 0.01) and produced lower IDE, AME, and AMEn of the test diets (P < 0.05). Inclusion of ESP or ESP+ had no effects on the on the metabolizability of DM or GE for either the reference or test diets, although both enzyme blends produce numerical increases in the GE and DM metabolizability of the test diets. Inclusion of ESP elevated (P < 0.05) the estimated AME of SBM obtained from this study (405 kcal/kg DM) and ESP+ inclusion tended (P < 0.10) to elevate the AME of SBM (304 kcal/kg DM). However, there were no significant differences observed for the IDE or AMEn of SBM.
Based on the data from this study, it is possible that inclusions of ESP or ESP+ can improve the energy utilization of SBM for broiler chickens when fed at 125 mg/kg.