Effects of sulphur, nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium, and water stress on dietary fibre fractions, starch, amino acids and on the biological value of potato protein.

In pot experiments with greatly differing rates of N, P, K, and S, and 3 levels of water, dry matter (DM) yields of tubers varied from 28 to 454 g/pot. Especially P-, K- and S-deficiency reduced the starch content of boiled potatoes, from P from 74 to 59% in DM. S-deficiency increased soluble, insoluble and total digestible fibre (TDF) from about 9 to 12.4% TDF in DM of boiled potatoes. Lignin content of fresh potato DM was increased from 0.7 to 2.0 and from 0.8 to 3.7% by P- and K-deficiency. P-deficiency considerably increased arabinose, galactose, and uronic acid, and decreased glucose content. N-application and P-, K- and S-deficiency increased total- and NO3-N concentrations which varied from 1.32 to 3.67% and from 17 to 400 ppm in DM. Water stress slightly decreased total-N content. Increasing N in DM, due to high N-rates or P- or K-deficiency, decreased concentrations in crude protein (CP) of all essential amino acids, whereas aspartic acid (asparagine) increased. S-deficiency caused particularly strong decreases in concentrations of essential amino acids from 1.28 to 0.49, 1.62 to 1.10, 5.24 to 3.68, and 5.59 to 2.57 g/16 g N of cystine, methionine, lysine and leucine, respectively. Glutamic acid (glutamine) content was increased from 15.7 to 27.6 g/16 g N by S-deficiency. Expressed as g amino acid/kg DM, all amino acid concentrations increased with increasing % N in DM. In N-balance trials with rats, increasing crude protein concentrations in DM of boiled potatoes increased the true digestibility (TD) of the protein from 72 to 90 but decreased the biological value (BV) from 89 to 65. S-deficiency caused a further reduction of the BV to 45. Excluding S-deficiency treatments, linear regression equations between CP concentrations and BV and TD gave correlation coefficients r of -0.94*** and 0.82***, respectively. There was close agreement between changes of BV and concentrations of first limiting amino acids (chemical score), with r = 0.96***.