Research Article Biodegradation of Palm Kernel Cake by Cellulolytic and Hemicellulolytic Bacterial Cultures through Solid State Fermentation Mohamed Idris Alshelmani, 1,2 Teck Chwen Loh, 1,3 Hooi Ling Foo, 4,5 Wei Hong Lau, 6 and Awis Qurni Sazili 1 1 Department of Animal Science, Faculty of Agriculture, Universiti Putra Malaysia (UPM), 43400 Serdang, Malaysia 2 Department of Animal Production, Faculty of Agriculture, University of Sebha, Sebha, Libya 3 Institute of Tropical Agriculture, Universiti Putra Malaysia (UPM), 43400 Serdang, Malaysia 4 Department of Bioprocess Technology, Faculty of Biotechnology and Biomolecular Sciences, Universiti Putra Malaysia (UPM), 43400 Serdang, Malaysia 5 Institute of Bioscience, Universiti Putra Malaysia (UPM), 43400 Serdang, Malaysia 6 Department of Plant Protection, Faculty of Agriculture, Universiti Putra Malaysia (UPM), 43400 Serdang, Malaysia Correspondence should be addressed to Teck Chwen Loh; tcloh@upm.edu.my Received 12 March 2014; Revised 15 May 2014; Accepted 24 May 2014; Published 12 June 2014 Academic Editor: Kunio Ohmiya Copyright © 2014 Mohamed Idris Alshelmani et al. his is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Four cellulolytic and hemicellulolytic bacterial cultures were purchased from the Leibniz Institute DSMZ-German Collection of Microorganisms and Cell Culture (DSMZ) and the American Type Culture Collection (ATCC). Two experiments were conducted; the objective of the irst experiment was to determine the optimum time period required for solid state fermentation (SSF) of palm kernel cake (PKC), whereas the objective of the second experiment was to investigate the efect of combinations of these cellulolytic and hemicellulolytic bacteria on the nutritive quality of the PKC. In the irst experiment, the SSF was lasted for 12 days with inoculum size of 10% (v/w) on diferent PKC to moisture ratios. In the second experiment, iteen combinations were created among the four microbes with one untreated PKC as a control. he SSF lasted for 9 days, and the samples were autoclaved, dried, and analyzed for proximate analysis. Results showed that bacterial cultures produced high enzymes activities at the 4th day of SSF, whereas their abilities to produce enzymes tended to be decreased to reach zero at the 8th day of SSF. Findings in the second experiment showed that hemicellulose and cellulose was signiicantly ( < 0.05) decreased, whereas the amount of reducing sugars were signiicantly ( < 0.05) increased in the fermented PKC (FPKC) compared with untreated PKC. 1. Introduction he global consumption of poultry products such as meat or eggs, nowadays, tends to increase in the developing countries. On the other hand, the global demand on the main poultry feedstufs will be increased, especially the protein and energy resources such as soybean meal and yellow corn, respectively. herefore, the global price of these feedstufs will be increased. hus, the cost of poultry diets will deinitely be increased as a result of the global demand. Currently, there are tendencies to use alternative sources of protein and energy to be substituted for soybean meal and yellow corn in monogastric animals such as poultry and swine. It is known that some of the developing countries produce abundant amounts of alternative feedstufs that are considered agro- waste byproducts such as wheat bran, rice bran, cotton seed meal, copra meal, and palm kernel cake. However, these agro- waste byproducts are featuring on the presence of nonstarch polysaccharides (NSPs) such as xylan and mannan, as well as antinutritional factors in some of these byproducts. It is known that Malaysia is one of the worldwide largest producers of palm oil. he process of oil extraction from palm Hindawi Publishing Corporation e Scientific World Journal Volume 2014, Article ID 729852, 8 pages http://dx.doi.org/10.1155/2014/729852