Evaluation of in-field efficacy of dietary ferric tyrosine on performance, intestinal health and meat quality of broiler chickens exposed to natural Campylobacter jejuni challenge

Campylobacter is an important pathogen commonly found in chickens that can cause severe acute gastroenteritis in humans. Despite intensive efforts to inhibit food-borne transmission of Campylobacter no effective strategy exists to reduce Campylobacter loads in farmed broilers. This study examined the capacity of a novel feed additive to lower Campylobacter jejuni populations and to improve growth efficiency of broiler chickens. A total of 384 male one-day-old broiler chicks were used in a 42-day trial. Birds were randomly allocated into four treatments with six replicates of sixteen chicks per pen. Three groups were fed the basal diets further supplemented with TYPLEX™ chelate (ferric tyrosine) at various concentrations (0.02, 0.05 and 0.20 g/kg, groups T2-T4, respectively). Control group (T1) was fed basal diets in mash form that did not contain added ferric tyrosine. Feed and water were provided ad libitum. At 20 days of age, broilers were exposed to natural C. jejuni challenge by introducing contaminated litter from a commercial farm. At day 25, pen litter samples analysed positive for C. jejuni, and the infection intensity was homogeneous among pens. At the end of the study C. jejuni counts in bird caeca were significantly reduced, by 2 log10 in the T4 group, compared to the T1 Control and T3 groups (p = 0.004). During this study, a natural infection with Eimeria tenella occurred at days 26-29. For animal welfare reasons all birds were treated with an anti-coccidial drug as recommended, for two consecutive days. At day 42, diarrhoea was observed on the litter in only 1 of 6 pens in the T4 group, but in 5 of 6 pens in the T1 Control group. In addition, autopsies showed that the T4 group had the highest percentage of birds with normal intestinal tracts. The T1 group had the lowest percentage of birds with infection-free tracts, and higher incidence of coccidiosis and bloody diarrhoea. At 42 days of age all birds were slaughtered and samples collected for further analysis. Birds in the T4 group tended to exhibit improved weight gain and feed efficiency, a result that warrants further investigation. Collectively, our data suggest that addition of ferric tyrosine at 0.20 g/kg exerts a protective effect against C. jejuni and coccidiosis

On-the-fly Computation Method in Field-Programmable Gate Array for Analog-to-Digital Converter Linearity Testing

This paper presents a new approach to linearity testing of analog-to-digital converters (ADCs) through on-the-fly computation in field-programmable gate array (FPGA) hardware. The proposed method computes the linearity while it is processing without compromising the accuracy of the measurement, so very little overhead time is required to compute the final linearity. The results will be displayed immediately after a single ramp is supplied to the device under test. This is a cost-effective chip testing solution for semiconductor companies, achieved by reducing computing time and utilization of low-cost and low-specification automatic test equipment (ATE). The experimental results showed that the on-the-fly computation method significantly reduced the computation time (up to 44.4%) compared to the conventional process. Thus, for every 100M 12-bit ADC tested with 32 hits per code, the company can save up to 139,972 Php on electricity consumption

Supertubes in Field Theories

To a domain wall or string object, Noether charge and topological spatial objects can be attracted, forming a composite BPS (Bogomolny-Prasad-Sommerfield) object. We consider two field theories and derive a new BPS bound on composite linear solitons involving multiple charges. Among the BPS objects `supertubes' appear when the wall or string tension is canceled by the bound energy, and could take an arbitrary closed curve. In our theories, supertubes manifest as Chern-Simons solitons, dyonic instantons, charged semi-local vortices, and dyonic instantons on vortex flux sheet.Comment: latex, 10 page

Wavelets in Field Theory

We advocate the use of Daubechies wavelets as a basis for treating a variety of problems in quantum field theory. This basis has both natural large volume and short distance cutoffs, has natural partitions of unity, and the basis functions are all related to the fixed point of a linear renormalization group equation.Comment: 42 pages, 2 figures, corrected typo

Long Term Feasibility Study of In-field Floating Microbial Fuel Cells for Monitoring Anoxic Wastewater and Energy Harvesting

© Copyright © 2019 Cristiani, Gajda, Greenman, Pizza, Bonelli and Ieropoulos. In the present work different prototypes of floating MFCs have been tested in anoxic water environments of wastewater plants in Italy, over a period of 3 years. Several configurations of horizontal (flat) and vertical (tubular) MFCs were assembled, using low-cost and light-weight materials, such as plastic lunch boxes, polystyrene or wood to keep the systems afloat, and ceramics for the MFCs. Untreated carbon cloth or veil was used for both anode and cathode electrodes. Felt (flat MFCs) or clay (tubular MFCs) was used as the cation-exchange separator. Single flat MFCs generated power up to 12 mW/m2 while a 32 cylindrical MFC stack generated up to 18 mW/m2. The testing lasted for more than 2 years and there was no inoculation other than exposing the MFCs to the denitrification environment. The cathodes of the flat MFCs were spontaneously colonized by algae and plants, and this did not affect the stability of the systems. Natural light increased the power output of the flat MFCs which were smaller than 50 × 50 cm. Diurnal oscillation of temperature and periodic water flow did not significantly affect the performance of the MFCs. The largest flat MFC produced the highest absolute power, although in a disrupted way. A new, simple low-energy remote monitoring system, based on LoRa technology was used for data transmission over distances of >500 m. This is a piece of hardware that could potentially be suitable for remote monitoring as part of a network, as it can be directly powered by the deployed MFCs

Dirichlet Solitons in Field Theories

I briefly describe a new class of soliton configurations in field theories. These consist of topological defects which can end when they intersect other defects of equal or higher dimensionality. Such configurations may be termed ``Dirichlet topological defects'', in analogy with the D-branes of string theory. I provide a specific example - cosmic strings that terminate on domain walls - and discuss some new directions for this work, including an interesting and qualitatively different extension to supersymmetric theories.Comment: 5 pages, to appear in the proceedings of COSMO-9

D-Branes in Field Theory

Certain gauge theories in four dimensions are known to admit semi-classical D-brane solitons. These are domain walls on which vortex flux tubes may end. The purpose of this paper is to develop an open-string description of these D-branes. The dynamics of the domain walls is shown to be governed by a Chern-Simons-Higgs theory which, at the quantum level, captures the classical "closed string" scattering of domain wall solitons.Comment: 23 Pages, 3 figures. v2: reference adde