The management of the lightweight piglets from modern pig systems

PhD ThesisThe management of lightweight pigs that have resulted from increases in sow prolificacy are a major challenge for modern pig systems. The overall aim of this thesis was to develop intervention strategies that improve the performance of light piglets without penalising heavy piglets, with the pre- and immediate post-weaning period being the most critical windows for intervention. In the first experiment (Chapter 2) creation of litter uniformity pre-weaning optimized the performance of piglets born lightweight, with long term benefits up to slaughter; heavy piglets on the other hand were penalized by this strategy. Despite heavy piglet efforts to compensate for insufficient milk intake by increasing creep feed intake, this was insufficient for achieving similar growths to heavy piglets kept in mixed litters. That being said, piglets born heavy ate high amounts of creep feed whereas piglets born light hardly consumed any creep feed. In Chapter 3, it shown that irrespective of birth weight mid parity sows were identified as best foster sows. Their piglets were weaned heavy, whilst having eaten high amounts of creep feed. Second parity sows also weaned heavy piglets, but due to piglet low creep feed intake they were unable to maintain this weight advantage post-weaning. Despite the high creep feed intake of primiparous sow reared piglets, these piglets were weaned light and remained light postweaning. Lightweight piglets did not seem to benefit from an amino acid enriched post-weaning starter regime (Chapter 4). Although birth weight is still commonly used as indicator for identifying runt piglets, not all light piglets are destined to remain light. In fact, piglet shape at birth such as, length and head circumferences in relation to birth weight, seemed better predictors of postnatal growth. Chapter 5 evaluated the effect of weaning age, weaning weight and an increased allowance of nursery diets on the performance of piglets through 5 months of age. The results suggested that an enhanced allowance of the nursery diets was beneficial, but that delayed weaning may yield long term benefits for piglets weaned lightweight. The data from this thesis provide novel information and implications for the management of lightweight piglets. Some lightweight piglets are able to improve their post-natal performance and creating the optimal environment such as litter uniformity, rearing them by mid parity sows and weaning later will be beneficial to them.Agriculture & Horticulture Development Board (AHDB) Pork and Primary Diet

Existence of Positive Solutions for a Discrete Three-Point Boundary Value Problem

A discrete three-point boundary value problem Δ2xk−1+λfk(xk)=0, k=1,2,…,n, x0=0, axl=xn+1, is considered, where 1≤l≤n is a fixed integer, a is a real constant number, and λ is a positive parameter. A characterization of the values of λ is carried out so that the boundary value problem has the positive solutions. Particularly, in this paper the constant a can be negative numbers. The similar results are not valid for the three-point boundary value problem of differential equations

Lingo3DMol: Generation of a Pocket-based 3D Molecule using a Language Model

Structure-based drug design powered by deep generative models have attracted increasing research interest in recent years. Language models have demonstrated a robust capacity for generating valid molecules in 2D structures, while methods based on geometric deep learning can directly produce molecules with accurate 3D coordinates. Inspired by both methods, this article proposes a pocket-based 3D molecule generation method that leverages the language model with the ability to generate 3D coordinates. High quality protein-ligand complex data are insufficient; hence, a perturbation and restoration pre-training task is designed that can utilize vast amounts of small-molecule data. A new molecular representation, a fragment-based SMILES with local and global coordinates, is also presented, enabling the language model to learn molecular topological structures and spatial position information effectively. Ultimately, CrossDocked and DUD-E dataset is employed for evaluation and additional metrics are introduced. This method achieves state-of-the-art performance in nearly all metrics, notably in terms of binding patterns, drug-like properties, rational conformations, and inference speed. Our model is available as an online service to academic users via sw3dmg.stonewise.c

Few-shot Learning in Intelligent Agriculture: A Review of Methods and Applications

Due to the high cost of data acquisition in many specific fields, such as intelligent agriculture, the available data is insufficient for the typical deep learning paradigm to show its superior performance. As an important complement to deep learning, few-shot learning focuses on pattern recognition tasks under the constraint of limited data, which can be used to solve practical problems in many application fields with data scarcity. This survey summarizes the research status, main models and representative achievements of few-shot learning from four aspects: model fine-tuning, meta-learning, metric learning and data enhancement, and especially introduces the few-shot learning-driven typical applications in intelligent agriculture. Finally, the current challenges of few-shot learning and its development trends in intelligent agriculture are prospected

Prevention and treatment of renal osteodystrophy in children on chronic renal failure: European guidelines

Childhood renal osteodystrophy (ROD) is the consequence of disturbances of the calcium-regulating hormones vitamin D and parathyroid hormone (PTH) as well as of the somatotroph hormone axis associated with local modulation of bone and growth cartilage function. The resulting growth retardation and the potentially rapid onset of ROD in children are different from ROD in adults. The biochemical changes of ROD as well as its prevention and treatment affect calcium and phosphorus homeostasis and are directly associated with the development of cardiovascular disease in pediatric renal patients. The aims of the clinical and biochemical surveillance of pediatric patients with CRF or on dialysis are prevention of hyperphosphatemia, avoidance of hypercalcemia and keeping the calcium phosphorus product below 5 mmol(2)/l(2). The PTH levels should be within the normal range in chronic renal failure (CRF) and up to 2–3 times the upper limit of normal levels in dialysed children. Prevention of ROD is expected to result in improved growth and less vascular calcification

Het behoorlijkheidsbeginsel in het gegevensbeschermingsrecht:nieuwe uitleg in bindende besluiten van de EDPB

Een van de kernbeginselen in het gegevensbeschermingsrecht is het vereiste om persoonsgegevens te verwerken op een wijze die behoorlijk is ten aanzien van betrokkenen. In de praktijk is nog niet altijd duidelijk wat dit precies inhoudt. Meer uitleg is dan ook welkom en die heeft de EDPB recent gegeven. In het kader van onderzoeken naar Facebook, Instagram en WhatsApp heeft de EDPB een drietal bindende besluiten genomen met normuitleg over het behoorlijkheidsbeginsel. Deze normuitleg heeft zij daarna toegepast op de concrete situaties in de onderzoeken om vervolgens te concluderen dat het beginsel is geschonden. Het geeft meer inzicht in de visie van de EDPB ten aanzien van het behoorlijkheidsbeginsel, maar is het ook voldoende om dit beginsel volledig te begrijpen