Učinak dodatka hrani (zakiseljivača i sredstva za vezivanje toksina) u proizvodnji mlijeka u mliječnih krava

Dairy cow feeding plays an important role in milk production. The present study was conducted to evaluate the effect of a feed additive (association of acidifier and mycotoxin binder) on milk production in dairy cattle. For this purpose, 22 cows belonging to three breeds (Montbeliard, Holstein, and Flekveih) were used. The cows were divided into two groups; a control group with seven cows and an experimental group with 15 animals. The results showed that the additive had a positive effect on milk production (23.14±5.87 litres for the experimental group vs 18.00±6.90 litres for the control). The additive also had a good effect on the percentage of sub-clinical mastitis: the Californian Mastitis Test (CMT) carried out at monthly intervals showed a clear improvement in the udder health of females in the experiment with 13 positive samples in the first test for nine cows (with four affected teats) and 10 positive samples for the second test in three cows (with three affected teats). Moreover, statistical tests revealed a significant difference in the mean fat content (35 g/L vs 23.86 g/L, respectively) while the average Faeces Consistency Score and Dornic acidity was lower in the experimental group compared to the control (2.23 vs 3.21 and 13.83 vs 16.14, respectively). These results show the importance of incorporating the feed additive into the diet of dairy cows and the need to implement an extension programme and zootechnical supervision of all actors in the sector to ensure the quality of milk production and the performance of dairy cows.Hranidba mliječnih krava je vrlo važna u njihovoj proizvodnji. Ova studija je provedena za procjenu učinka dodatka hrani (kombinacije zakiseljivača i sredstva za vezivanje mikotoksina) na proizvodnju mlijeka u mliječnih krava. U tu su svrhu praćeme 22 krave: 3 pasmine (montbeliard, holstein i flekveih). Krave su podijeljene u 2 skupine: kontrolnu skupinu sa 7 krava i eksperimentalnu skupinu s 15 životinja. Dobiveni rezultati pokazali su da organska kiselina ima pozitivan učinak na proizvodnju mlijeka (23,14±5,87 litara za eksperimentalnu skupinu u usporedbi s 18,00±6,90 litara za kontrolnu skupinu). Uz to, aditiv je imao i pozitivan učinak na postotak subkliničkog mastitisa. Kalifornijski mastitis test (CMT) proveden u razmaku od 1 mjeseca za životinje pokazao je jasno poboljšanje zdravlja vimena krava podvrgnutih istraživanju s 13 pozitivnih uzoraka u prvom testu za 9 krava (s 4 zahvaćene sise) i 10 drugih pozitivnih uzoraka za drugi test u 3 krave (s 3 zahvaćene sise). Statistički testovi su otkrili značajnu razliku između prosječnog udjela masnoća (35 g/L u usporedbi s 23,86 g/L) dok je prosječno bodovanje konzistencije izmeta i kiselost po Dornicu bilo niže u istoj skupini u usporedbi s kontrolnom skupinom (2,23 u usporedbi s 3,21 i 13,83 u usporedbi s 16,14). Podatci su pokazali važnost i potrebu dodatka hrani u hranidbu mliječnih krava i potrebu za provedbom programa proširenja i zootehničkog nadzora svih aktera u sektoru da bi se osigurala kvaliteta proizvodnje mlijeka i učinkovitost mliječnih krava

Characterization of greater middle eastern genetic variation for enhanced disease gene discovery

The Greater Middle East (GME) has been a central hub of human migration and population admixture. The tradition of consanguinity, variably practiced in the Persian Gulf region, North Africa, and Central Asia1-3, has resulted in an elevated burden of recessive disease4. Here we generated a whole-exome GME variome from 1,111 unrelated subjects. We detected substantial diversity and admixture in continental and subregional populations, corresponding to several ancient founder populations with little evidence of bottlenecks. Measured consanguinity rates were an order of magnitude above those in other sampled populations, and the GME population exhibited an increased burden of runs of homozygosity (ROHs) but showed no evidence for reduced burden of deleterious variation due to classically theorized ‘genetic purging’. Applying this database to unsolved recessive conditions in the GME population reduced the number of potential disease-causing variants by four- to sevenfold. These results show variegated genetic architecture in GME populations and support future human genetic discoveries in Mendelian and population genetics

Effect of angiotensin-converting enzyme inhibitor and angiotensin receptor blocker initiation on organ support-free days in patients hospitalized with COVID-19

IMPORTANCE Overactivation of the renin-angiotensin system (RAS) may contribute to poor clinical outcomes in patients with COVID-19. Objective To determine whether angiotensin-converting enzyme (ACE) inhibitor or angiotensin receptor blocker (ARB) initiation improves outcomes in patients hospitalized for COVID-19. DESIGN, SETTING, AND PARTICIPANTS In an ongoing, adaptive platform randomized clinical trial, 721 critically ill and 58 non–critically ill hospitalized adults were randomized to receive an RAS inhibitor or control between March 16, 2021, and February 25, 2022, at 69 sites in 7 countries (final follow-up on June 1, 2022). INTERVENTIONS Patients were randomized to receive open-label initiation of an ACE inhibitor (n = 257), ARB (n = 248), ARB in combination with DMX-200 (a chemokine receptor-2 inhibitor; n = 10), or no RAS inhibitor (control; n = 264) for up to 10 days. MAIN OUTCOMES AND MEASURES The primary outcome was organ support–free days, a composite of hospital survival and days alive without cardiovascular or respiratory organ support through 21 days. The primary analysis was a bayesian cumulative logistic model. Odds ratios (ORs) greater than 1 represent improved outcomes. RESULTS On February 25, 2022, enrollment was discontinued due to safety concerns. Among 679 critically ill patients with available primary outcome data, the median age was 56 years and 239 participants (35.2%) were women. Median (IQR) organ support–free days among critically ill patients was 10 (–1 to 16) in the ACE inhibitor group (n = 231), 8 (–1 to 17) in the ARB group (n = 217), and 12 (0 to 17) in the control group (n = 231) (median adjusted odds ratios of 0.77 [95% bayesian credible interval, 0.58-1.06] for improvement for ACE inhibitor and 0.76 [95% credible interval, 0.56-1.05] for ARB compared with control). The posterior probabilities that ACE inhibitors and ARBs worsened organ support–free days compared with control were 94.9% and 95.4%, respectively. Hospital survival occurred in 166 of 231 critically ill participants (71.9%) in the ACE inhibitor group, 152 of 217 (70.0%) in the ARB group, and 182 of 231 (78.8%) in the control group (posterior probabilities that ACE inhibitor and ARB worsened hospital survival compared with control were 95.3% and 98.1%, respectively). CONCLUSIONS AND RELEVANCE In this trial, among critically ill adults with COVID-19, initiation of an ACE inhibitor or ARB did not improve, and likely worsened, clinical outcomes. TRIAL REGISTRATION ClinicalTrials.gov Identifier: NCT0273570

One-Class SVMs Challenges in Audio Detection and Classification Applications

Support vector machines (SVMs) have gained great attention and have been used extensively and successfully in the field of sounds (events) recognition. However, the extension of SVMs to real-world signal processing applications is still an ongoing research topic. Our work consists of illustrating the potential of SVMs on recognizing impulsive audio signals belonging to a complex real-world dataset. We propose to apply optimized one-class support vector machines (1-SVMs) to tackle both sound detection and classification tasks in the sound recognition process. First, we propose an efficient and accurate approach for detecting events in a continuous audio stream. The proposed unsupervised sound detection method which does not require any pretrained models is based on the use of the exponential family model and 1-SVMs to approximate the generalized likelihood ratio. Then, we apply novel discriminative algorithms based on 1-SVMs with new dissimilarity measure in order to address a supervised sound-classification task. We compare the novel sound detection and classification methods with other popular approaches. The remarkable sound recognition results achieved in our experiments illustrate the potential of these methods and indicate that 1-SVMs are well suited for event-recognition tasks

Using robust features with multi-class SVMs to classify noisy sounds

Abstract—In a sounds recognition system, the most encoun-tered problem is the background noise that can be captured with the sounds to be identified. This paper describes work that has been performed to address this problem. First, the robustness to the environmental noise is investigated for specific kinds of acoustic representation. The representations considered are RASTA-PLP, J-RASTA and wavelets-based processing. Then, we propose to apply Multi-Class Support Vector Machines (SVMs) as a discriminative framework in order to address audio classification. The experiments conducted on a multi-class problem show that this classifier clearly overperforms the conventional HMM-based system, and hence, we can efficiently address a sounds classification problem characterized by complex real-world datasets, even under important noise degradation conditions. I

Robust Audio Speaker Segmentation using One Class SVMs

International audienceThis paper presents a new technique for segmenting an audio stream into pieces, each one contains speeches of only one speaker. Speaker segmentation has been used extensively in various tasks such as automatic transcription of radio broadcast news and audio indexing. The segmentation method used in this paper is based on a discriminative distance measure between two adjacent sliding windows operating on preprocessed speech. The proposed unsupervised detection method which does not require any pre-trained models is based on the use of the exponential family model and 1-SVMs to approximate the generalized likelihood ratio. Our 1-SVM-based segmentation algorithm provides improvements over baseline approaches which use the Bayesian Information Criterion (BIC). The segmentation results achieved in our experiments illustrate the potential of this method in detecting speaker changes in audio streams containing overlapped and short speeches

Functional Regularized Least Squares Classification with Operator-valued Kernels

Although operator-valued kernels have recently received increasing interest in various machine learning and functional data analysis problems such as multi-task learning or functional regression, little attention has been paid to the understanding of their associated feature spaces. In this paper, we explore the potential of adopting an operatorvalued kernel feature space perspective for the analysis of functional data. We then extend the Regularized Least Squares Classification (RLSC) algorithm to cover situations where there are multiple functions per observation. Experiments on a sound recognition problem show that the proposed method outperforms the classical RLSC algorithm. 1

Ultrasound Assisted Extraction of Phenolic Compounds from a Jujube By-Product with Valuable Bioactivities

Jujube plant is a potential source of polyphenols with biological propreties. The purpose of this study was to investigate the application of ultrasound technique for extracting phenolic compounds (TPC) from seeds of Zizyphus lotus under optimization conditions based on response surface methodology. A maximum TPC, total flavonoids content (TFC), and total condensed tannins content (TTC) of 2383.10 ± 0.87 mg GAE/100g, 486.50 ± 0.38 mg QE/100g and 15,787.10 ± 0.10 mg CE/100g, respectively obtained under ethanol concentration 50.16%, sonication temperature 29.01 °C, sonication time 15.94 min and solvent-to-solid ratio 34.10:1 mL/g. The optimized extract was then evaluated for its antioxidant, antiacethylcholinesterase, antihypercholesterolemia, and antiproliferative activities. The results showed that ultrasound method is a green and safe method that can be used to effectively extract TPC from jujube seeds. The biological activity of Zizyphus extract exhibited a very good antioxidant against DPPH (EC50 = 0.39 µg/mL) and FRAP (1670.42 ± 6.5 mg/100 g). Additionally, it possesses acetylcholinesterase (AChE) inhibitory effect (IC50 = 0.93 ± 0.01 mg/mL) and HMGR inhibition (45.41%) using 100 µg/mL. The extract significantly inhibits cell proliferation on the MCF-7 and HepG2 tumor cell lines with an IC50 values of <0.05 and 3 ± 0.55 mg/mL, respectively. Therefore, the ultrasound method can be considered a method for obtaining a significant anticancer activity with respect to the lines and therefore makes it possible to recover a maximum of phenolic compounds in less time with an AChE and HMGR inhibitory activity. Thus, it can be suggested that Zls extract is a promising fruit for the development of supplementary dietary due to its potential behaviour as nutraceutical

Screening biological traits and fluoride contents of native vegetations in arid environments to select efficiently fluoride-tolerant native plant species for in-situ phytoremediation

International audienceHigh fluoride pollution has been detected in the surrounding soils of the coastal superphosphate industries in the Gulf of Gabes (Southeast of Tunisia). A study was conducted in vicinity of factories analysing plant functional traits combined with plant fluoride accumulation and soil metal concentrations aiming to screen more efficiently native plant species tolerant to this pollution. Aerial parts of 18 plant species out of the 10 most abundant species per site were harvested on two polluted sites of Gabes and Skhira at the vicinity of the factories and on the less polluted site of Smara. Native plant species accumulated fluoride following the gradient of soil pollution. Fluoride contents of plant aerial parts ranged from 37 mg kg(-1) to 360 mg kg(-1) and five plant species were only found in the most polluted site. However these latter had low biomass and soil cover. Crossing biological traits and fluoride contents, a selection grid for potentially restorative plant species enabled the selection of three native perennials i.e. Rhanterium suaveolens, Atractylis serratuloides and, Erodium glaucophyllum as potential candidates for an in-situ phytoremediation program on arid fluoride-polluted sites. This approach may be used in other fluoride-polluted Mediterranean environments. (C) 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved