Microbial-environmental interactions reveal the evaluation of fermentation time on the nutrient properties of soybean meal

Microbial fermentation techniques are often used to improve their quality, where the keys are fermentation strains and fermentation time. This study studied the interaction between microbiota and environmental (or nutritional) factors and microbiota at different fermentation times to determine the most appropriate time, using lactic acid bacteria as fermentation strains. It can be concluded that fermentation improved the nutritional value of soybean meals. In the early stages of fermentation, debris in soybean meal highly proliferated and destabilized the microbial community, while pH and nutritional conditions played an important role in helping its stabilization. In addition, we must pay attention to the interspecific interactions of microorganisms, which makes it easy to understand how the microbial community maintains community stability. A 4-day fermentation of soybean meal with Lactobacillus is recommended

Taurine improves health of juvenile rice field eel (Monopterus albus) fed with oxidized fish oil: Involvement of lipid metabolism, antioxidant capacity, inflammatory response

An 8-weeks feeding experiment was performed to evaluate the potential effect of dietary taurine on the growth, liver oxidative stress and lipid metabolism, intestinal integrity and inflammatory response as well as the skin pigments of Monopterus albus fed with the oxidized fish oil diet. With that purpose, four iso-nitrogenous and iso-lipid experimental diets were formulated, including FO (2% fresh fish oil), OO (2% oxidized fish oil completely replacing the fresh fish oil in FO group) supplemented with 0%, 0.2% (OOT0.2) and 0.5% (OOT0.5) taurine. Each diet was randomly fed to triplicate groups of 50 fish (average initial weight 30.09 ± 0.06 g). The results showed that long-term feeding of OO diet did not affect the growth performance, while decreased the contents of serum immune parameters, lowered the liver antioxidative enzymes activities and induced oxidative stress, caused abnormal fat deposition in liver by interfering lipid metabolism-related genes mRNA express profile, simultaneously accompanied by hepatocyte atrophy, destroyed the intestinal mucosal barrier through dysregulation of the mRNA expression of tight junction proteins and raised the inflammatory response by elevating the pro-inflammatory cytokines mRNA abundance, and generated undesirable skin hyperpigmentation via boosting tyrosinase activity. Notably, taurine administration improved the growth performance and partially mitigated the negative impacts in M. albus subjected to the oxidized fish oil. Taken together, it was supposed that taurine exerted its anti-oxidative and anti-inflammatory properties to confer protection against oxidized fish oil. These findings would provide a theoretical basis for the application of taurine in aquatic feed

A Study on How Methionine Restriction Decreases the Body’s Hepatic and Lipid Deposition in Rice Field Eel (<i>Monopterus albus</i>)

Methionine restriction reduces animal lipid deposition. However, the molecular mechanism underlying how the body reacts to the condition and regulates lipid metabolism remains unknown. In this study, a feeding trial was performed on rice field eel Monopterus albus with six isonitrogenous and isoenergetic feeds that included different levels of methionine (0, 2, 4, 6, 8, and 10 g/kg). Compared with M0 (0 g/kg), the crude lipid and crude protein of M. albus increased markedly in M8 (8 g/kg) (p p p , hsl, mttp, ldlrap, pparα, cpt1, and cpt2 were remarkably downregulated in M8, while srebf2, lpl, moat2, dgat2, hdlbp, srebf1, fas, fads2, me1, pfae, and icdh were markedly upregulated in M8. Moreover, hepatic SREBP1 and FAS protein expression were upregulated significantly in M8 (p M. albus, especially for hepatic lipid deposition, and mainly downregulated hepatic fatty acid metabolism. Besides, gcn2 could be activated under methionine restriction

NTIRE 2022 Challenge on Stereo Image Super-Resolution: Methods and Results

In this paper, we summarize the 1st NTIRE challenge on stereo image super-resolution (restoration of rich details in a pair of low-resolution stereo images) with a focus on new solutions and results. This challenge has 1 track aiming at the stereo image super-resolution problem under a standard bicubic degradation. In total, 238 participants were successfully registered, and 21 teams competed in the final testing phase. Among those participants, 20 teams successfully submitted results with PSNR (RGB) scores better than the baseline. This challenge establishes a new benchmark for stereo image SR