Generation and analysis of large-scale expressed sequence tags (ESTs) from a full-length enriched cDNA library of porcine backfat tissue

BACKGROUND: Genome research in farm animals will expand our basic knowledge of the genetic control of complex traits, and the results will be applied in the livestock industry to improve meat quality and productivity, as well as to reduce the incidence of disease. A combination of quantitative trait locus mapping and microarray analysis is a useful approach to reduce the overall effort needed to identify genes associated with quantitative traits of interest. RESULTS: We constructed a full-length enriched cDNA library from porcine backfat tissue. The estimated average size of the cDNA inserts was 1.7 kb, and the cDNA fullness ratio was 70%. In total, we deposited 16,110 high-quality sequences in the dbEST division of GenBank (accession numbers: DT319652-DT335761). For all the expressed sequence tags (ESTs), approximately 10.9 Mb of porcine sequence were generated with an average length of 674 bp per EST (range: 200–952 bp). Clustering and assembly of these ESTs resulted in a total of 5,008 unique sequences with 1,776 contigs (35.46%) and 3,232 singleton (65.54%) ESTs. From a total of 5,008 unique sequences, 3,154 (62.98%) were similar to other sequences, and 1,854 (37.02%) were identified as having no hit or low identity (<95%) and 60% coverage in The Institute for Genomic Research (TIGR) gene index of Sus scrofa. Gene ontology (GO) annotation of unique sequences showed that approximately 31.7, 32.3, and 30.8% were assigned molecular function, biological process, and cellular component GO terms, respectively. A total of 1,854 putative novel transcripts resulted after comparison and filtering with the TIGR SsGI; these included a large percentage of singletons (80.64%) and a small proportion of contigs (13.36%). CONCLUSION: The sequence data generated in this study will provide valuable information for studying expression profiles using EST-based microarrays and assist in the condensation of current pig TCs into clusters representing longer stretches of cDNA sequences. The isolation of genes expressed in backfat tissue is the first step toward a better understanding of backfat tissue on a genomic basis

Formability of austenitic and ferritic stainless steels at warm forming temperature

The warm temperature drawability of austenitic (STS 304) and ferritic stainless (STS 430) steel sheet samples was evaluated using the cup drawing test. The measured limiting drawing ratios (LDRs) increased about 44% and 25% for STS 304 and STS 430, respectively, compared to the isothermal case by introducing optimal temperature gradients between punch and die/blank holder. The drawability improvement was more drastic with STS 304 than with STS 430 using this temperature gradient approach. Fully coupled thermo-mechanical finite element (FE) analyses of the warm cup drawing tests were also carried out and validated using experimental data. For an accurate FE modeling, the mechanical properties measured in uniaxial and balanced biaxial tension tests were accounted for. For STS 304, an isotropic, temperature-dependent, yield function led to a reasonable prediction of the cup drawing performance at all temperature conditions. However, for STS 430, an anisotropic yield function was necessary to achieve good accuracy, in particular, for the prediction of the fracture location and cup height. Besides drawability, the earing profiles of the STS 430 cups were also simulated using three different yield functions, namely, von Mises, Hill48 and the non-quadratic anisotropic Yld2000-2d. Comparisons with experimental measurements indicated that the latter resulted in the best earing profile predictions for various temperature conditions. (C) 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.X112019sciescopu

Life test sampling plans for Weibull distributed lifetimes under accelerated hybrid censoring

Life test sampling plan, Hybrid censoring, Producer risk, Consumer risk, Acceleration factor, 62N05,