Do Cereal Grains and Soybean Oil Meal Influence the Chick’s Need for an Unidentified Factor or Factors Present in Fish Meal and a Liver Fraction

PATTON, Marvel, Petering, and Waddel (1946) suggested that the need for supplementing a chick diet composed largely of ground corn and soybean oil meal and adequate in known vitamins may be due to some peculiarity of corn or soybean oil meal or a combination of these materials. These workers did not obtain a growth response by supplementing a purified diet containing “vitamin free casein” and gelatin with fish meal. Since casein and gelatin did not give a growth response when added to the corn-soybean oil meal diet to supply the same amount of protein as the supplement of fish meal, they concluded that these materials did not contain the factor or factors supplied by fish meal, and that chicks did not require the unidentified factor or factors in fish meal when fed the purified diet. These workers did not determine whether addition of the amount of casein and gelatin present in the purified diet to the corn-soybean oil meal diet would improve growth.