Briefly, the dietary ingredients were blended with water (100 ml water per 1 kg diet) to form a paste which was then passed through a meat grinder equipped with a 3-mm die to obtain uniform pellets. The pelleted diets were air-dried till the moisture was lower than 10%. The levels of S. cerevisiae in diets supplemented with live yeast were verified by pellet homogenization, serial dilution and spreading of the dilutions on YPD plates. All the diets were stored in plastic bags at
4 C until use