Agriculture & Food, Volume 11, 2023

Rezumat: The development of the poultry industry increased the request for conventional feed ingredients (soybean meal and oil, fish meal), leading to higher costs and environmental pressure. In this context, there is an increased interest in finding sustainable alternatives such as protein-rich insect species as innovative ingredients in poultry diets. Sericulture produces a lot of by-products, including silkworm pupae (SWP), a valuable and less expensive alternative protein source. Therefore, this review firstly presents the nutritional value of full-fat and defatted SWP as potential feed ingredients for poultry. The proximate composition of SWP consists of 37.8–82.8% crude protein (with a higher digestibility ranging from 76% to 98%), 2–36.2% crude fat, 1–9.5% crude fibre, 1–10.6% ash, and 21.9–25.8 MJ/kg gross energy. SWP has high-quality protein and lipids due to their essential amino acids (40- 48% of total amino acids content) and fatty acids profiles (especially alpha-linolenic, 20-38% and linoleic, 5.5–21%). The vitamins, minerals, and other bioactive compounds (i.e., 1-Deoxynojirimycin, 1-DNJ) complete their nutritional value. SWP also contains a polysaccharide, chitin (1.5–3.4% of dry matter), with structural function in organisms. Secondly, we reported the effects of using SWP in broilers, laying hens and quails diets, focusing on productive performance, health status and quality of poultry products. The findings demonstrated that SWP could partially replace conventional ingredients in poultry diets, maintaining appropriate performance and/or improving meat or egg qualities.