Colicin E1 addition to the swine diet prevents post weaning diarrhea

Post-weaning diarrhea remains a threat to swine production in the US despite the use of antibiotic feed additives and other alternative therapies utilized in post-weaning diets. Colicins are proteins produced by, and effective against E. coli, including the enterotoxigenic Escherichia coli (ETEC) responsible for post-weaning diarrhea. The addition of 16.5 of a mg/kg highly purified Colicin E1 (ColE1) to a post-weaning ration reduced the duration and severity of diarrhea caused by a combination of two F18+ ETEC strains over a five day study. Semi-quantitative real time PCR of the ileum revealed lower levels of mRNA expression for inflammatory cytokines IL-1beta and TNFbeta in the 16.5 mg/kg ColE1 fed group as compared to the control animals. These data, taken together with a lower number of ETEC challenge bacteria recovered from ColE1 fed animals 24 hours after oral challenge, suggests that the dietary ColE1 was able to reduce the numbers of ETEC able to colonize the ileum, thereby rendering it unable to cause diarrhea.;In a longer duration study that lasted 4 weeks, a more natural seeder pig challenge model was utilized, and ColE1 addition was also efficacious. This study utilized a post weaning diet containing thought to be protective against PWD such as spray dried plasma and whey protein for the first two weeks. To this diet, 20 mg/kg ColE1 was added. Exposure to the seeder animal without dietary ColE1 supplementation resulted in similar rates of PWD as those achieved by direct oral challenge in the previous study. Much lower rates of diarrhea were noted in the ColE1 fed group (18%) as compared to the control animals (80%) between days 4 and 10 after exposure to the sick animal. Body weight gains were significantly higher in the ColE1 fed pigs as a result, compared to those without the dietary addition at weeks 1 and 2. In a group of pigs not exposed to ETEC challenge, no body weight differences were noted when ColE1 was added to the diet. Semi quantitative real time PCR analysis of ileum mucosa showed higher levels of TNFalpha in the challenged, non-treated animals than those with the ColE1 addition and both diets in the non-challenged room 4 weeks after exposure to the seeder animal. Levels of COX-2 and PGHS, enzymes responsible for maintenance of immune function and barrier function in the intestine, were higher in the ColE1 fed, challenged animals than any other group.;Overall, the addition of the ColE1 purified from a Colicin E1 producing E. coli culture reduced the incidence and severity of PWD in both an oral challenge model and a seeder pig challenge model. The expense required to purify the ColE1 used in this study makes it cost prohibitive for use as an additive in swine feed at this time. For this reason, we have utilized recombinant yeast technology to express the ColE1. This method requires no purification cost because intracellular expression of the ColE1 enables the yeast cell to be directly fed to the pigs

Академічна історія української літератури: традиції і новаторство

Recent behavioral and electrophysiological evidence has highlighted the long-term importance for language skills of an early ability to recognize words in continuous speech. We here present further tests of this long-term link in the form of follow-up studies conducted with two (separate) groups of infants who had earlier participated in speech segmentation tasks. Each study extends prior follow-up tests: Study 1 by using a novel follow-up measure that taps into online processing, Study 2 by assessing language performance relationships over a longer time span than previously tested. Results of Study 1 show that brain correlates of speech segmentation ability at 10 months are positively related to 16-month-olds’ target fixations in a looking-while-listening task. Results of Study 2 show that infant speech segmentation ability no longer directly predicts language profiles at the age of five. However, a meta-analysis across our results and those of similar studies (Study 3) reveals that age at follow-up does not moderate effect size. Together, the results suggest that infants’ ability to recognize words in speech certainly benefits early vocabulary development; further observed relationships of later language skills to early word recognition may be consequent upon this vocabulary size effect

An Orthographic Effect in Phoneme Processing, and Its Limitations

In three phoneme goodness rating experiments, listeners heard phonetic tokens varying along a continuum centered on /s/, occurring finally in isolated word or non-word tokens. An effect of spelling appeared in Experiment 1: native English-speakers’ goodness ratings for the best /s/ tokens were significantly higher in words spelled with S (e.g., bless) than in words spelled with C (e.g., voice). Since the tokens were in fact identical in each word, this effect indicates less than optimal evaluation performance. No spelling effect appeared when non-native speakers rated the same materials in Experiment 2, indicating that the observed difference could not be due to acoustic characteristics of the S- versus C-words. In Experiment 3, native English-speakers’ ratings for /s/ did not differ in non-words rhyming with words consistently spelled with S (e.g., pless) or with words consistently spelled with C (e.g., floice); i.e., no effects of lexical rhyme analogs appeared. It is concluded that the findings are better explained in terms of phonemic decisions drawing upon lexical information where convenient than by obligatory influence of lexical knowledge upon pre-lexical processing

Juncture prosody across languages : similar production but dissimilar perception

How do speakers of languages with different intonation systems produce and perceive prosodic junctures in sentences with identical structural ambiguity? Native speakers of English and of Mandarin produced potentially ambiguous sentences with a prosodic juncture either earlier in the utterance (e.g., “He gave her # dog biscuits,” “他给她 # 狗饼干”), or later (e.g., “He gave her dog # biscuits,” “他给她狗 # 饼干”). These production data showed that prosodic disambiguation is realized very similarly in the two languages, despite some differences in the degree to which individual juncture cues (e.g., pausing) were favoured. In perception experiments with a new disambiguation task, requiring speeded responses to select the correct meaning for structurally ambiguous sentences, language differences in disambiguation response time appeared: Mandarin speakers correctly disambiguated sentences with earlier juncture faster than those with later juncture, while English speakers showed the reverse. Mandarin speakers also showed higher levels of accuracy in disambiguation compared to English speakers, indicating language-specific differences in the extent to which prosodic cues are used. However, Mandarin, but not English, speakers showed a decrease in accuracy when pausing cues were removed. Thus even with high similarity in both structural ambiguity and production cues, prosodic juncture perception across languages can differ

Asymmetric memory for birth language perception versus production in young international adoptees

Adults who as children were adopted into a different linguistic community retain knowledge of their birth language. The possession (without awareness) of such knowledge is known to facilitate the (re)learning of birth-language speech patterns; this perceptual learning predicts such adults' production success as well, indicating that the retained linguistic knowledge is abstract in nature. Adoptees' acquisition of their adopted language is fast and complete; birth-language mastery disappears rapidly, although this latter process has been little studied. Here, 46 international adoptees from China aged four to 10 years, with Dutch as their new language, plus 47 matched non-adopted Dutch-native controls and 40 matched non-adopted Chinese controls, undertook across a two-week period 10 blocks of training in perceptually identifying Chinese speech contrasts (one segmental, one tonal) which were unlike any Dutch contrasts. Chinese controls easily accomplished all these tasks. The same participants also provided speech production data in an imitation task. In perception, adoptees and Dutch controls scored equivalently poorly at the outset of training; with training, the adoptees significantly improved while the Dutch controls did not. In production, adoptees' imitations both before and after training could be better identified, and received higher goodness ratings, than those of Dutch controls. The perception results confirm that birth-language knowledge is stored and can facilitate re-learning in post-adoption childhood; the production results suggest that although processing of phonological category detail appears to depend on access to the stored knowledge, general articulatory dimensions can at this age also still be remembered, and may facilitate spoken imitation

The efficiency of cross-dialectal word recognition

This research was supported by a Max Planck Society doctoral fellowship and a Fulbright Foundation award, both to the first author. We thank Delphine Dahan, University of Pennsylvania, for enabling the testing of the participants.Dialects of the same language can differ in the casual speech processes they allow; e.g., British English allows the insertion of [r] at word boundaries in sequences such as saw ice, while American English does not. In two speeded word recognition experiments, American listeners heard such British English sequences; in contrast to non-native listeners, they accurately perceived intended vowel-initial words even with intrusive [r]. Thus despite input mismatches, cross-dialectal word recognition benefits from the full power of native-language processing.peer-reviewe

The phonological status of Dutch epenthetic schwa

This is the publisher's version, also available electronically from http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract?fromPage=online&aid=114625.In this paper, we use articulatory measures to determine whether Dutch schwa epenthesis is an abstract phonological process or a concrete phonetic process depending on articulatory timing. We examine tongue position during /l/ before underlying schwa and epenthetic schwa and in coda position. We find greater tip raising before both types of schwa, indicating light /l/ before schwa and dark /l/ in coda position. We argue that the ability of epenthetic schwa to condition the /l/ alternation shows that Dutch schwa epenthesis is an abstract phonological process involving insertion of some unit, and cannot be accounted for within Articulatory Phonology