Feeding Fusarium-infected wheat to yellow mealworm larvae (Tenebrio Molitor) to produce a safe, replacement protein source for animal feed
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Various insect species including the yellow mealworm (Tenebrio molitor) could be an alternative and sustainable source of protein for animal feed. There is evidence that yellow mealworm larvae can utilize deoxynivalenol (DON)-contaminated wheat as a food source without sequestering it, producing a safe protein ingredient. This study aimed to determine the potential accumulation of DON in T. molitor larvae reared on Fusarium-infected wheat containing high levels of DON and investigate the effects of DON exposure on production, survival and nutritional traits of the larvae. Wheat containing 200 μg/kg DON was used as the control diet. A different source of wheat was sorted into six fractions and mixed to obtain three levels of DON for low (2,000 μg/kg), medium (10,000 μg/kg) and high (12,000 μg/kg) treatments. Each treatment was replicated five times with 300 or 200 mealworms per replicate for the feeding and breeding trials, respectively. Trial termination was determined when the first two pupae were observed (32-34 days). There was no difference in the levels of DON detected in the larvae between treatments and ranged from 121.8±19.3 to 136.4±40.5 μg/kg (P=0.883). Excretion of DON in pooled frass samples was 131.0, 324.0, 230.4 and 742.1 μg/kg for control, low, medium and high, respectively. The concentrations of 3-acetyldeoxynivalenol (3-ADON) detected in frass ranged from 279.5 to 326.4 μg/kg, whereas levels in larvae ranged from 65.3 to 66.2 μg/kg and were from undetectable to 204.9 μg/kg in wheat. Nutritional analysis on pooled samples from both trials showed maximum levels of crude protein (CP) of 52% and crude fat (CF) of 36%. Ash, fiber, chitin, fatty-acids and amino-acids content were consistent across treatments. Survival was greater than 96% for all life stages in both trials. In the feeding trial, average daily gain (ADG) ranged from 1.9±0.1 to 2.1±0.1 mg/day per mealworm. Less than 1.2% of the ingested DON was accumulated by larvae when they consumed Fusarium-infected wheat containing levels up to 12,000 μg/kg. These results along with the lack of effect on the nutritional profile, survival, or production traits, supports using DON-contaminated wheat in large-scale production of mealworms to produce a sustainable, safe protein source.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".