Thermal effect on availability of individual amino acids (AIAA) of redkidney
beans was evaluated.Sulfur amino acids (SAA), methionine and cystine (Met + Cys),are the limiting amino acids (AA)and have the lowest availability among the AAs in nine treatments.The availability of SAA (ASAA)ranged from -18.6% in raw
beans to 39.8-68.0% in thermallyprocessed
beans. Autoclaving at121
C for 10-90 min gradually reduced ASAA values. The meanavailability for each AA (MAEAA)is the average of the AIAA values for the same AA. MAEAA valuesranged from 82.1% (arginine)to 50.4% (Met + Cys). The mean availability in each treatment(MAET) is the average of the AIAAvalues in the same treatment. The difference between MAET and truedigestibility of protein (TDP)was less than 7%. However, the differences between ASAA and TDP(16-37%) and between ASAAand MAET (14-30%) were large. The ASAA-corrected amino acidscore (AAS
ASAA) for raw
beanswas negative (-29.4%) and ranged from 61.8 to 42.1% for thermallyprocessed
beans. From acomparison among the protein quality indexes, AAS
ASAA isthe preferred method to evaluate proteinquality of
beans.Keywords: Amino acid availability; availability-corrected amino acid score;red kidney
beans