A Quest for Excellence in Amino Acid Nutrition...

The Development of AminoMax was initiated at Kansas State University in 1995 with the aspiration of producing cost-competitive, plant-based protein sources with high ruminal bypass and superior amino acid bioavailability. The utility of high quality protein sources resistant to microbial digestion was at that time clearly evident, but the 1997 regulatory ban on use of ruminant-derived proteins in dairy, beef, and sheep operations of the United States and Canada underscored the critical need for plant-based proteins with high ruminal bypass that could replace animal-based bypass proteins, both safely and cost-effectively.

Early attempts by Kansas State University researchers to produce a higher-quality bypass protein focused on combining soybean meal with peroxidized soybean lipids. The peroxidized lipids served as reducing agents that could promote a controlled Maillard reaction, thus improving rumen bypass characteristics of plant-based proteins. When properly controlled, the Maillard reaction results in reversible binding of lysine and other amino acids by reducing compounds, making proteins that are resistant to digestion by microbes within the rumen, but that also are available for absorption in the small intestine. The peroxidized lipid process was very effective as a means of decreasing ruminal degradation of the protein, but the reaction proceeded too slowly to be commercially viable. These early experiments proved to be important developmental steps, however, as they became the impetus for conducting a series of investigations aimed at characterizing the non-protein components of a variety of plant protein meals. Through this exercise the research team discovered that plant protein meals contain a variety of carbohydrate compounds that could be modified by enzymatic hydrolysis, yielding highly reactive sugar moieties that readily induced the desired browning reaction. Armed with this information, the researchers embarked on yet another series of experiments to explore the potential for using a wide range of natural enzyme preparations to identify products that yielded optimal reactivity. Combinations of several key enzymes proved most effective, but cost of these mixtures was cost-prohibitive.

At this point the team arrived at a critical juncture in their research, turning their attention to select strains of yeast as sources of enzymes. These yeasts, when combined with plant proteins under stringently controlled processing conditions, could be induced to synthesize an abundance of natural enzymes. Enzymes produced by select strains of live yeast effectively cleaved carbohydrates within the plant proteins sources, yielding large quantities of the desired reactive sugars that could readily participate in controlled Maillard reactions to create bypass proteins of unsurpassed quality and consistency. Subsequent experiments revealed that plant-based proteins produced with this new process offered the advantage of high ruminal bypass, but with far superior amino acid bioavailability.

This simple concept of combining select strains of live yeast with plant proteins under meticulously controlled conditions has served as the foundation for development of AminoMax products, and was awarded a patent early in 2003. The AminoMax products of today represent the culmination of more than 15 years of exhaustive university research and field testing, supported by an ongoing commitment to progressive improvements in state-of-the-art manufacturing technology to produce cost-effective, safe, plant-based bypass protein products of unsurpassed quality and value.