The amino acids contained in feedstuffs are not fully available to animal. It is therefore more efficient to formulate diets using values for digestible amino acids rather than total amino acids. The optimisation of amino acid supply leads to increased animal performance and, because the ingested protein is better balanced for animal's requirements, nitrogen excretion is reduced. Formulating to digestible amino acids, however, requires consistent and comparable data.

The AmiPig table provides amino acid ileal digestibility values for 62 common feedstuffs used in pig diets. These data (calculated from more than 350 samples) were obtained between 1987 and 1997 by INRA, Aventis Animal Nutrition and ITCF, associated with Ajinomoto Eurolysine. With further support from the French Ministry of Research, and with the help of the French Feed Database of the AFZ, these organisations have combined their databases to produce this unique, comprehensive and reliable corpus of pig amino acid digestibilities.

The three laboratories used comparable experimental protocols, including surgical procedure (the pigs were fitted with end-to-end ileo-rectal anastomosis) and the formulation of diets (the tested feedstuff was the sole source of protein of the diet). After a strict scientific assessment of their compatibility, the three databases were merged to obtain the AmiPig database. Apparent and standardised ileal digestibilities were calculated according to a unique concept.

In addition to the digestibility values, AmiPig contains, for each feedstuff, the total and digestible amino acid values, proximate analysis data, the standard deviations of these values and the numbers of samples used in the calculations. Other features include the ability to make comparison tables and graphs for the different feedstuffs and amino acid values, and the export to popular data formats.