EFFECT OF Β-ALANINE AND L-HISTIDINE ON CONCENTRATION OF CARNOSINE IN MUSCLE TISSUE AND OXIDATIVE STABILITY OF CHICKEN MEAT

This paper presents the results of two separate experiments, each involving 75 chickens of Cobb 500 provenience, divided into three experimental groups. During the last three weeks of fattening, chickens were fed finisher diets supplemented with amino acids β-alanine (0%, 0.5% and 1%) and L-histidine (0%, 0.3% and 0.5%) in different portions. After chickens have been slaughtered, 10 samples of breast tissue were taken from each group for carnosine content determination in muscle tissue and lipid oxidation expressed as TBARS. Analysis of THE results referring to carnosine concentration in breast muscle proved that supplementation of 0.5% L-histidine affected the carnosine concentration increase in breast muscles from 941.58 µg/g of tissue (H1) to 1186.06 µg/g of tissue (H3), while supplementation of 1% β-alanine influenced the increase in carnosine concentration from 756.15 µg/g of tissue (A1) to 911.01 µg/g of tissue (A3). Supplementation of amino acids did not have effects on TBARS values, but oxidation values decreased along with the supplementation of higher amounts of amino acids to diets, which was particularly expressed in samples stored for 60 days at -20°C. The experimental group H3 (0.5% L-histidine) exhibited 30.54% lower value of lipid oxidation than the control one H1 (0% L-histidine), while the group with 1% β-alanine (A3) had lipid oxidation value by 17.65% lower than the control group A1 (0% β-alanine)

Repeated inoculations with the lung and heartworm nematode <i>Angiostrongylus vasorum</i> result in increasing larval excretion and worm burden in the red fox (<i>Vulpes vulpes</i>)

The French heartworm Angiostongylus vasorum is found in European red fox (Vulpes vulpes) and dog populations, where it appears to be spreading geographically. Once introduced into new areas, it establishes in local fox populations, typically to over 50% prevalence in a few years. High susceptibility and constant excretion of first stage larvae (L1) by the definitive hosts are prerequisites for sustaining high parasite biomass in a particular habitat. The present study explores the hypothesis that repeated ingestion of gastropods in nature will result in accumulation of adult worms and elevated excretion of L1 in feces. Experimentally infected foxes were subsequently inoculated via stomach tube once (9 weeks post initial inoculation) or twice (9 and 13 weeks post inoculation (wpi)) with 100 third stage A. vasorum larvae (L3) previously isolated from aquatic snails infected with L1 from a naturally infected dog. Despite large variation in fecal larval excretion for the individual animals within the groups, excretion of L1 was significantly higher in foxes twice inoculated as compared to foxes inoculated only once. With an outlier in the once inoculated group removed, excretion became significantly higher in the three times inoculated group. Establishment of adult worms varied and only a trend to higher worm burdens was found in the group of foxes inoculated three times. However, this became significant with the same single outlier removed. Overall, it appears that protective immunity to A. vasorum does not appear to occur in V. vulpes with animals exhibiting high infection intensities without obvious clinical signs. The increasing larval excretion in foxes being repeatedly exposed to A. vasorum L3 support the hypothesis that foxes under natural conditions may repeatedly ingest infected gastropods and remain a source of environmental contamination for several months, potentially contributing to the establishment of endemic foci through increasing L1 excretion. Keywords: Foxes, Angiostrongylus vasorum, Experimental inoculation, Immunology, Larval excretion, Worm burde

Ligand-based and structure-based studies to develop predictive models for {SARS}-{CoV}-2 main protease inhibitors through the 3d-qsar.com portal

The main protease (M-pro) of SARS-Cov-2 is the essential enzyme for maturation of functional proteins implicated in viral replication and transcription. The peculiarity of its specific cleavage site joint with its high degree of conservation among all coronaviruses promote it as an attractive target to develop broad-spectrum inhibitors, with high selectivity and tolerable safety profile. Herein is reported a combination of three-dimensional quantitative structure-activity relationships (3-D QSAR) and comparative molecular binding energy (COMBINE) analysis to build robust and predictive ligand-based and structure-based statistical models, respectively. Models were trained on experimental binding poses of co-crystallized M-pro-inhibitors and validated on available literature data. By means of deep optimization both models' goodness and robustness reached final statistical values of r(2)/q(2) values of 0.97/0.79 and 0.93/0.79 for the 3-D QSAR and COMBINE approaches respectively, and an overall predictiveness values of 0.68 and 0.57 for the SDEP(PRED )and AAEP metrics after application to a test set of 60 compounds covered by the training set applicability domain. Despite the different nature (ligand-based and structure-based) of the employed methods, their outcome fully converged. Furthermore, joint ligand- and structure-based structure-activity relationships were found in good agreement with nirmatrelvir chemical features properties, a novel oral M-pro-inhibitor that has recently received U.S. FDA emergency use authorization (EUA) for the oral treatment of mild-to-moderate COVID-19 infected patients. The obtained results will guide future rational design and/or virtual screening campaigns with the aim of discovering new potential anti-coronavirus lead candidates, minimizing both time and financial resources. Moreover, as most of calculation were performed through the well-established web portal 3d-qsar.com the results confirm the portal as a useful tool for drug design.[GRAPHICS]

Down-regulation of the Lamin A/C in neuroblastoma triggers the expansion of tumor initiating cells

Tumor-initiating cells constitute a population within a tumor mass that shares properties with normal stem cells and is considered responsible for therapy failure in many cancers. We have previously demonstrated that knockdown of the nuclear envelope component Lamin A/C in human neuroblastoma cells inhibits retinoic acid-mediated differentiation and results in a more aggressive phenotype. In addition, Lamin A/C is often lost in advanced tumors and changes in the nuclear envelope composition occur during tumor progression. Based on our previous data and considering that Lamin A/C is expressed in differentiated tissues, we hypothesize that the lack of Lamin A/C could predispose cells toward a stem-like phenotype, thus influencing the development of tumor-initiating cells in neuroblastoma. This paper demonstrates that knockdown of Lamin A/C triggers the development of a tumor-initiating cell population with self-renewing features in human neuroblastoma cells. We also demonstrates that the development of TICs is due to an increased expression of MYCN gene and that in neuroblastoma exists an inverse relationship between LMNA and MYCN expression

Electrical stimulation counteracts muscle atrophy associated with aging in humans

Functional and structural muscle decline is a major problem during aging. Our goal was to improve in old subjects quadriceps m. force and mobility functional performances (stair test, chair rise test, timed up and go test) with neuromuscular electrical stimulation (9 weeks, 2-3times/week, 20-30 minutes per session). Furthermore we performed histological and biological molecular analyses of vastus lateralis m. biopsies. Our findings demonstrate that electrical stimulation significantly improved mobility functional performancies and muscle histological characteristics and molecular markers

Dialect transfer for Swiss German speech translation

This paper investigates the challenges in building Swiss German speech translation systems, specifically focusing on the impact of dialect diversity and differences between Swiss German and Standard German. Swiss German is a spoken language with no formal writing system, it comprises many diverse dialects and is a low-resource language with only around 5 million speakers. The study is guided by two key research questions: how does the inclusion and exclusion of dialects during the training of speech translation models for Swiss German impact the performance on specific dialects, and how do the differences between Swiss German and Standard German impact the performance of the systems? We show that dialect diversity and linguistic differences pose significant challenges to Swiss German speech translation, which is in line with linguistic hypotheses derived from empirical investigations

ZHAW-CAI : ensemble method for Swiss German speech to Standard German text

This paper presents the contribution of ZHAW-CAI to the Shared Task ”Swiss German Speech to Standard German Text” at the SwissText 2021 conference. Our approach combines three models based on the Fairseq, Jasper and Wav2vec architectures trained on multilingual, German and Swiss German data. We applied an ensembling algorithm on the predictions of the three models in order to retrieve the most reliable candidate out of the provided translations for each spoken utterance. With the ensembling output, we achieved a BLEU score of 39.39 on the private test set, which gave us the third place out of four contributors in the competition

Business, Technological, and Social Dimensions of Computer Games: Multidisciplinary Developments Business, technological, and social dimensions of computer games: multidisciplinary developments

, editors. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. Summary: &quot;This book is a collection of the most recent developments in all areas of game development, encompassing planning, design, marketing, business management, and consumer behavior&quot;--Provided by publisher. ISBN 978-1-60960-567-4 (hbk.) --ISBN 978-1-60960-568-1 (ebook) 1. Video games industry. 2. Video games--Design. 3. Video games--Social aspects. I

STT4SG-350 : a speech corpus for all Swiss German dialect regions

We present STT4SG-350, a corpus of Swiss German speech, annotated with Standard German text at the sentence level. The data is collected using a web app in which the speakers are shown Standard German sentences, which they translate to Swiss German and record. We make the corpus publicly available. It contains 343 hours of speech from all dialect regions and is the largest public speech corpus for Swiss German to date. Application areas include automatic speech recognition (ASR), text-to-speech, dialect identification, and speaker recognition. Dialect information, age group, and gender of the 316 speakers are provided. Genders are equally represented and the corpus includes speakers of all ages. Roughly the same amount of speech is provided per dialect region, which makes the corpus ideally suited for experiments with speech technology for different dialects. We provide training, validation, and test splits of the data. The test set consists of the same spoken sentences for each dialect region and allows a fair evaluation of the quality of speech technologies in different dialects. We train an ASR model on the training set and achieve an average BLEU score of 74.7 on the test set. The model beats the best published BLEU scores on 2 other Swiss German ASR test sets, demonstrating the quality of the corpus