Digestibility of brewers’ grains by swine

The digestion experiment was made with two young pigs. The Cr2O3 ratio technique was used. The diet consisted of 4.4 kg wet brewers' grains and 6 kg skim-milk per day per animal. The components of the latter food were presumed to be completely digestible. For the components of the brewers' grains the following average digestibility percentages were obtained: organic matter 43.3; crude protein 58.9; N-free organic matter 38.9; membrane substances 7.8; valuable N-free substances 59.7. According to different food tables the digestibility of the crude protein of brewers' grains is in ruminants 68—73 %, and the corresponding figure for N-free organic matter 59—69. Comparison of the figures presented gives evidence of the inferiority of swine in making use of brewers’ grains

Determination of the complex of cell wall substances in plant products

The authors present a new method for the determination of the complex of vegetable cell wall substances. The sample is extracted with boiling 80 % ethanol, boiling absolute ethanol and cold water. The residue corrected for ash, protein, and, if necessary, for starch, gives the amount of cell wall substances. Determinations were made of the same samples of which Salo in this department, using quite a different principle, has determined the cell wall complex. She determined separately cellulose, neutral sugar hemicellulose, uronic acid hemicellulose, and lignin. Adding up these items Salo obtained the total of the cell wall substances. The results obtained with the new method are in most cases in agreement with the results of Salo (Table 1). The 80 % ethanol seems to be a very efficient solvent. In most cases more than 35 % of the dry matter of the sample was dissolved by it, while only about 0.3 % was dissolved in the succeeding extraction with absolute ethanol (Table 2). 1—12 % was dissolved by water. The new method is compared also with the earlier method of Paloheimo in which the sample is boiled in 0.05 N hydrochloric acid. It appeared that the results obtained with the latter procedure are considerably lower than those obtained with the new method. Evidently most plant materials contain cell wall substances which are extractable with a very weak acid treatment

Some quantitative data on the role of the ruminant proventriculi in the digestion and absorption of nitrogen-free organic matter

Fourteen cows and five young bulls were fed with hay uniformly during 10 days. After slaughtering, the ingesta of the abomasum were removed and sampled. From the hay, from the contents of the abomasum, and from the feces lignin, N-free organic matter, and N-free non-lignin organic matter were determined. Using the lignin ratio principle, the digestibility of the two N-free fractions was calculated both for the proventriculi and for the whole digestive tract. It appeared that of the total amount of the N-free non-lignin organic matter digested in the whole digestive tract, 76—99 % was digested in the proventriculi. If the results for two of the cows are discarded, the limits in the cows are 85 and 91 %. On the basis of this investigation it can be concluded that in cattle carbohydrates are digested mainly in the proventriculi and their degradation products are absorbed principally from these stomachs

A method for cellulose determination

The usual metods for cellulose determinations, excepting those in which the material is decomposed by total hydrolysis, are principally methods for producing cellulose preparations. In these the non-cellulosic compounds are tried to be removed as thoroughly as possible without decomposing the cellulose. However, the preparations obtained still contain different non-cellulosic components for which corrections must be made. In the method proposed by the authors a crude cellulose preparation is produced by a relatively mild treatment, and corrections are made for crude lignin and pentosans. The main feature in producing the crude cellulose preparation is shaking the samples with 3N NaOH solution in pressure bottles in a boiling water bath. The method appears to give readable results for fodder materials. For woods the results are evidently too high, especially due to mannan in the crude cellulose

Analyses of plant products in greater detail

The customary Weende system for food analysis is biologically defective and even misleading. The authors have used an analysis scheme in which the conventional crude fibre determination is replaced by the determination of the total of the vegetable cell wall substances. This fraction is called membrane substances. The crude fibre is an arbitrary fragment of this total. E.g. in spruce wood the crude fibre forms about 80 % of the total of the membrane substances, and in wheat bran about 50 %. In addition the fraction »membrane substances» is divided into 4 subtractions: cellulose, pentosans, lignin, and other membrane substances. Further, a fraction called valuable carbohydrates is determined by subtracting from 100 the percentages of water, ash, crude protein, crude fat, and membane substances. This scheme has been applied to the investigation of 44 different plant products. A critical examination of the methods used has been included

A novel multivariate STeady-state index during general ANesthesia (STAN)

The assessment of the adequacy of general anesthesia for surgery, namely the nociception/anti-nociception balance, has received wide attention from the scientific community. Monitoring systems based on the frontal EEG/EMG, or autonomic state reactions (e.g. heart rate and blood pressure) have been developed aiming to objectively assess this balance. In this study a new multivariate indicator of patients' steady-state during anesthesia (STAN) is proposed, based on wavelet analysis of signals linked to noxious activation. A clinical protocol was designed to analyze precise noxious stimuli (laryngoscopy/intubation, tetanic, and incision), under three different analgesic doses; patients were randomized to receive either remifentanil 2.0, 3.0 or 4.0 ng/ml. ECG, PPG, BP, BIS, EMG and [Formula: see text] were continuously recorded. ECG, PPG and BP were processed to extract beat-to-beat information, and [Formula: see text] curve used to estimate the respiration rate. A combined steady-state index based on wavelet analysis of these variables, was applied and compared between the three study groups and stimuli (Wilcoxon signed ranks, Kruskal-Wallis and Mann-Whitney tests). Following institutional approval and signing the informed consent thirty four patients were enrolled in this study (3 excluded due to signal loss during data collection). The BIS index of the EEG, frontal EMG, heart rate, BP, and PPG wave amplitude changed in response to different noxious stimuli. Laryngoscopy/intubation was the stimulus with the more pronounced response [Formula: see text]. These variables were used in the construction of the combined index STAN; STAN responded adequately to noxious stimuli, with a more pronounced response to laryngoscopy/intubation (18.5-43.1 %, [Formula: see text]), and the attenuation provided by the analgesic, detecting steady-state periods in the different physiological signals analyzed (approximately 50 % of the total study time). A new multivariate approach for the assessment of the patient steady-state during general anesthesia was developed. The proposed wavelet based multivariate index responds adequately to different noxious stimuli, and attenuation provided by the analgesic in a dose-dependent manner for each stimulus analyzed in this study.The first author was supported by a scholarship from the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT SFRH/BD/35879/2007). The authors would also like to acknowledge the support of UISPA—System Integration and Process Automation Unit—Part of the LAETA (Associated Laboratory of Energy, Transports and Aeronautics) a I&D Unit of the Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT), Portugal. FCT support under project PEst-OE/EME/LA0022/2013.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio