What Are Roles of Beta Alanine in Animal Production
Improve animal performance.
The reason that β-alanine can improve animal production performance may be that β-alanine can be used as a neurotransmitter to regulate the secretion of growth hormone and then regulate animal growth. However, it is also affected by animal species, feeding and management methods, environment, and feeding methods of β-alanine.
Regulate the content of imidazole dipeptide in muscle.
Carnosine is an endogenous functional dipeptide, which mainly exists in skeletal muscle and breast muscle. It has biological activities such as stabilizing intracellular pH, inhibiting lipid peroxidation, scavenging free radicals, and regulating Ca2+. Studies have shown that the effect of adding β-alanine to drinking water to increase carnosine is far better than adding carnosine directly to drinking water.
Research suggests that the way in which beta-alanine is ingested may have some effect on the amount of carnosine in tissues. The increase in carnosine content may be due to the high content of histidine in the body. And the rate of carnosine synthesis is mainly affected by β-alanine. Exogenous addition of β-alanine is beneficial to increase the Michaelis constant value of carnosine synthase, so as to increase the content of carnosine.
The content of carnosine varies with gender, tissues and organs. Taking the same alanine, the proportion of carnosine content in the breast muscle of male animals is higher than that of female animals.
Improve muscle quality.
β-alanine can increase muscle fiber density and muscle tenderness, reduce muscle fiber diameter, reduce muscle shear force, reduce fat oxidation and stress, so as to improve muscle quality. The synergistic effect and mechanism of β-alanine and other nutritional supplements (such as creatine, β-hydroxy-β-methylbutyrate, N-carbamoylglutamate, etc.) regulating muscle metabolism in increasing muscle production and improving muscle quality of meat animals is an effective way to improve the quality of meat livestock and poultry products.
Improve muscle antioxidant capacity.
β-alanine can increase carnosine content, reduce lipid peroxidation in muscle, and improve muscle antioxidant capacity. Studies on mice have shown that β-alanine can increase the activity of superoxide dismutase (SOD) and glutathione peroxidase (GSH-Px) in gastrocnemius muscle, reduce the content of malondialdehyde (MDA), thereby improving antioxidant capacity of skeletal muscle.
Increase the consumption of taurine in the body.
Taurine is a sulfur-containing amino acid that exists in free form in the body. It is not directly involved in protein synthesis, but is related to amino acid metabolism in vivo. Beta-alanine can cause depletion of taurine because of competition for uptake and metabolism.
Neurobiological studies have shown that β-alanine and γ-aminobutyric acid (GABA) can share transporters. So β-alanine may affect the function of GABA and the regulation of food intake.