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Introduction
Since coconut oil is the main commercial product in many coconut-producing countries, the industry may put more effort into producing the best quality oil rather than increasing the quality of the copra meal by-products. Various reports have identified that copra meal is of typically poor nutritional and feeding value when it was used as a feed ingredient in poultry diets. The poor quality of copra meal is due to its low concentration of several limiting amino acids (Creswell and Brooks, 1971; NRC, 1994; Sundu et al., 2009), heat damage during drying and oil extraction process (Butterworth and Fox, 1963) and high levels of dietary fibre (Knudsen, 1997; Sundu and Dingle, 2003; Sundu, 2008).
Although efforts have been made to improve the feeding value of copra meal through physical and enzymatic treatments (Sundu et al., 2005) and fermentation (Hatta and Sundu, 2009), limited success has been achieved in improving its nutritive value to allow acceptable levels of body weight gain in poultry. Many of the results were far from the body weights expected from standard breed tables. Instead of focusing on improving its nutritive value, extracting mannans from copra meal is the other area that can be potentially useful as a feed additive. Sundu and Damry (2008) pioneered research into using beta-mannans from copra meal as a prebiotic to replace antibiotic growth promoters and as a mycotoxin binder, since mannan-oligosaccharides from yeast have been successfully used to improve performance and health status of birds for decades. Since then, several authors have reported the success of using CM in the diets of broiler chickens (Yamin, 2010; Fitryani, 2009). This paper reviews the potential use of CMs as either a prebiotic or a novel mycotoxin binder as compared to other similar products for broiler chickens.
Plant mannans
Southgate (1991) classified mannans as; 'reserve polysaccharides which are mainly the polymer of mannose, linked by either alpha or beta configuration'. Typically, mannans are encountered in different sub-families, depending upon the presence of other sugars in the polymer chain and these include pure mannan, galactomannan and glucomannan, and linkage configuration such as alpha and beta-mannan. Pure mannan is a polymer of mannose as it contains more than 95% mannose. The presence of...