LAUSR

Abstract An 8-week feeding trial was conducted to compare the effects of different lysine isomers on growth performance, amino acid metabolism-related enzyme activities, antioxidant capacity and muscle amino acid composition of giant river prawn (Macrobrachium rosenbergii). The basal diet was formulated to be low in lysine and contained only 10.9 g/kg lysine. The other three experimental diets were supplemented with 12 g/kg D -lysine, L -lysine, and D L -lysine, respectively. Dietary lysine supplementation improved the growth rate and feed utilization of M. rosenbergii, but significant differences were only found between the prawn fed the control diet and the L -lysine diet. L -lysine supplementation significantly improved the intestinal and hepatic trypsin activities, but unaffected the lipase and amylase activities. The highest hepatic aspartate aminotransferase and alanine aminotransferase activities were observed in prawn fed the L -lysine diet, whereas the highest γ-glutamyl transferase activity was found in prawn fed the D -lysine diet. D -lysine supplementation significantly increased the intestinal and hepatic D -amino acid oxidase activities. However, L -lysine supplementation improved the hepatic lysozyme activity and total antioxidant capacity, depressed the hepatic lactate dehydrogenase and alkaline phosphatase activities. Conversely, D -lysine supplementation generally depressed the hepatic superoxide dismutase and peroxidase activities, and nitric oxide content. Furthermore, L -lysine supplementation increased the muscle aspartic acid, serine, glutamic acid, alanine, lysine, arginine, delicious amino (DAA), non-essential amino acids, total amino acids (TAA) contents and DAA/TAA ratio. These results indicate that M. rosenbergii can effectively utilize L -lysine for growth; D -lysine may partly be used but reveal specific toxic effects on antioxidant response.