Dietary Omega-3 Oil Supplementation To Increase Omega-3 Polyunsaturated Fatty Acids In The Red Tilapia(Oreochromis Hybrid) And Catfish (Clarias Gariepinus)

A study was carried out to determine the essential polyunsaturated fatty acid (PUFA) profiles of the red tilapia (Oreochromis hybrid) and catfish (Clarias gariepinus) and an attempt was made to increase the omega-3 polyunsaturated fatty acids by dietary omega -3 oil supplementation. The fatty acid profiles of commercially farmed adult fish were determined using standard extraction, fatty acid methylation and gas liquid chromatographic procedures and the fatty acid concentration of dried fish tissues was expressed in absolute amounts (mg/g) as a measure of the actual fatty acid content in the fish tissues. The levels of total fatty acids, SFA, UFA, monoenes, total n-6, total n-3, 18:2n-6 and 18:3n-3 were higher in the catfish compared to the red tilapia. The higher (17-20% of the total fatty acids) n-6 PUFA found in both fish compared to n-3 PUFA (1.0 – 9.5 %) was characteristic for freshwater fish. The absolute amounts of total n-6 and n-3 PUFA increased as the age of the fish increased for both species of fish when measured from 10 to 75 days of age although they decreased when expressed as a percentage of total fatty acids. The absolute amounts of total n-6 PUFA in the red tilapia increased from 10.0 ± 0.6 mg/g at 10 days to 26.6 ± 2.4 mg/g at 75 days of age. The absolute amounts of total n-3 PUFA in the red tilapia increased from 3.6 ± 0.2 mg/g at 10 days to 9.4 ± 0.3 mg/g at 75 days of age. Similarly, the absolute amounts of total n-6 PUFA in the catfish increased from 15.1 ±1.0 mg/g at 10 days to 36.5 ± 2.5 mg/g at 75 days of age whilst the absolute amounts of total n-3 PUFA increased from 8.1 ± 0.2 mg/g at 10 days to 21.8 ± 1.5 mg/g at 75 days of age. The results were suggestive of a combined effect of accumulation, desaturation and elongation and oxidation of the PUFA in the fish tissues. The Δ6 desaturase enzyme activity in the liver microsomes was measured in six of each species of fish employing radiolabelled linoleic acid [1-14C] and argentation thin layer chromatography. Desaturase activities were detected in both species but the activity in the red tilapia (3.55 + 0.2%; 1.19 + 0.1 pmol/min/mg protein) was higher, although not significant (p>0.05), than the catfish (3.07 ± 0.2%; 1.02 + 0.1 pmol/min/mg protein). The antioxidant enzymes, superoxide dismutase (SOD) and glutathione peroxidase (GSH-Px) and the lipid peroxidation value of malonaldehyde (MDA) were measured in ten of each species of fish. The antioxidant activity was higher in the catfish whilst the lipid peroxidation value was higher in the red tilapia. The activity of SOD (1.54 ± 0.1 U/g) and GSH-Px (0.37 ± 0.1 U/g) in the red tilapia was lower than the activity of SOD (2.48 ± 0.1 U/g) and GSH-Px (1.18 ± 0.1 U/g) in the catfish. The MDA values were 21.39 ± 0.5 nmol/g for the red tilapia compared to 19.15 ± 0.2 nmol/g for the catfish. The dietary omega-3 oil supplementation trial was carried out for eight weeks where the fish was reared in glass aquariums in under three dietary treatments, in triplicate. The treatment diets were the control diet CON (with no oil added), or diets containing added 10% or 20% flaxseed oil (10% FLAX or 20% FLAX) or added 10% or 20% cod-liver oil (10% COD, 20% COD). The desirable n-3 PUFA were not increased by the 10% FLAX or 10% COD diets where the total n-3 PUFA concentrations in the red tilapia were 3.2 + 0.1 mg/g (CON), 2.6 ± 0.2 mg/g (10% FLAX) and 3.4 ± 0.2 mg/g (10% COD). The n-3 PUFA concentrations in the catfish were 7.1 ± 0.4 mg/g (CON), 6.4 ± 0.1 mg/g (10% FLAX) and 6.4 ± 0.4 mg/g (10%COD). However, the n-3 PUFA concentrations were significantly increased (p<0.05) when fed the 20% FLAX and 20% COD diets. In the red tilapia the n-3 PUFA concentrations were 3.4 ± 0.1 mg/g (CON), 4.7 ± 0.1 mg/g (20% FLAX) and 3.8 ± 0.2 mg/g (20% COD). The n-3 PUFA concentrations in the catfish were 6.5 ± 0.3 mg/g (CON), 8.5 ± 0.6 mg/g (20% FLAX) and 9.0 ± 0.6 mg/g (20% COD). However high mortality rates up to 60% were encountered when the 20% FLAX and 20% COD diets were used suggesting that the levels of the oils used in these diets were toxic to the fish. Histological examinations carried out at post-mortem confirmed the toxicological condition by the occurrence of several histopathological lesions in the liver, kidney and small intestine. In conclusion, the essential PUFA profiles of the red tilapia which has a herbivorous mode of nutrition and the catfish which is more omnivorous, with different desaturase and oxidative enzyme activities are somewhat different, where the former represents a better source of desirable essential PUFA to the human consumer. The concentrations of the desirable essential PUFA in both fishes can be increased by modifying their diets to contain added oils such as flaxseed or cod-liver oil but the percentage of the added oils have to be between 10-20% of the diet to avoid toxicity and high mortalities

Source side pre-ordering using recurrent neural networks for English-Myanmar machine translation

Word reordering has remained one of the challenging problems for machine translation when translating between language pairs with different word orders e.g. English and Myanmar. Without reordering between these languages, a source sentence may be translated directly with similar word order and translation can not be meaningful. Myanmar is a subject-objectverb (SOV) language and an effective reordering is essential for translation. In this paper, we applied a pre-ordering approach using recurrent neural networks to pre-order words of the source Myanmar sentence into target English’s word order. This neural pre-ordering model is automatically derived from parallel word-aligned data with syntactic and lexical features based on dependency parse trees of the source sentences. This can generate arbitrary permutations that may be non-local on the sentence and can be combined into English-Myanmar machine translation. We exploited the model to reorder English sentences into Myanmar-like word order as a preprocessing stage for machine translation, obtaining improvements quality comparable to baseline rule-based pre-ordering approach on asian language treebank (ALT) corpus

Development of Leucaena Mimosine-Degrading Bacteria in the Rumen of Sheep in Myanmar

Myanmar has an agricultural base, and about 70% of people reside in rural areas. They depend for survival on agriculture and small-scale crop production, with ruminant livestock consuming fibrous agricultural residues. For optimal ruminant production, concentrates are needed as supplements to these residues. As concentrates are expensive, researchers are testing alternative protein sources like legumes, including foliage from leguminous trees such as leucaena (Leucaena leucocephala). Leucaena is the most widely used leguminous tree as a ruminant feed because it is rich in protein (~ 22%) and contains easily digestible fibre (23% neutral detergent fibre, 16.6% acid detergent fibre; Ni Ni Maw 2004). Khin Htay Myint (2005) noted that 25% of leucaena in the ration tended to increase nitrogen retention without decreasing dry matter and organic matter digestibilities. However, leucaena leaves contain a toxic non-protein amino acid, called mimosine. Research workers have endeavoured to reduce mimosine toxicity in animals fed leucaena in Myanmar (Aung Aung 2007, Wink Phyo Thu 2010) and one avenue of research was the development of mimosine-degrading bacteria in the rumen of sheep fed leucaena. In this paper we describe an experiment tracing the development of mimosine-degrading bacteria in the rumen of sheep

Polyunsaturated fatty acid accumulation and antioxidant enzyme activity in red tilapia (Oreochromis hybrid) fed high omega-3 diets

This study was conducted to investigate the change of muscle fatty acid profiles with increasing age and to measure the activities of muscle antioxidant enzymes in red tilapia (Oreochromis hybrid) fed with relatively high n-3 diet. Fish were reared in aquaria and fed with a formulated diet which was high in n-3 polyunsaturated fatty acid (PUFA) for 75 days. Significant increase (p<0.05) of saturated fatty acids, monoenes and n-6 PUFA was observed at 60 days after start of the experiment, while significant increase of n-3 PUFA occurred at 75 days after start of the experiment. The superoxide dismutase and glutathione peroxidase activities were found to be 1.5 ± 0.1 and 0.4 ± 0.1 (U/g; Mean ± SE; n = 10), respectively. Lipid peroxidation value (MDA) was found to be 21.4 ± 0.5 nmol/g (Mean ± SE; n = 10). Our results suggested that feeding red tilapia with a high n-3 finishing diet from 75 days prior to harvesting can successfully increase the n-3 PUFA content of fillet. However, the relatively low antioxidant enzymes activity and high value of lipid peroxidation in the muscle tissue should be considered for proper storage and handling of red tilapia fillet to ensure the availability of desirable n-3 PUFA and to avoid the accumulation of undesirable oxidation products

The Safety of a Conservative Fluid Replacement Strategy in Adults Hospitalised with Malaria

BackgroundA conservative approach to fluid resuscitation improves survival in children with severe malaria; however, this strategy has not been formally evaluated in adults with the disease.MethodsAdults hospitalised with malaria at two tertiary referral hospitals in Myanmar received intravenous fluid replacement with isotonic saline, administered at a maintenance rate using a simple weight-based algorithm. Clinical and biochemical indices were followed sequentially.ResultsOf 61 adults enrolled, 34 (56%) had Plasmodium falciparum mono-infection, 17 (28%) Plasmodium vivax mono-infection and 10 (16%) mixed infection; 27 (44%) patients were at high risk of death (P. falciparum infection and RCAM score &ge; 2). In the first six hours of hospitalisation patients received a mean 1.7 ml/kg/hour (range: 1.3&ndash;2.2) of intravenous fluid and were able to drink a mean of 0.8 ml/kg/hour (range: 0&ndash;3). Intravenous fluid administration and oral intake were similar for the remainder of the first 48 hours of hospitalisation. All 61 patients survived to discharge. No patient developed Adult Respiratory Distress Syndrome, a requirement for renal replacement therapy or hypotension (mean arterial pressure &lt; 60mmHg). Plasma lactate was elevated (&gt; 2 mmol/L) on enrolment in 26 (43%) patients but had declined by 6 hours in 25 (96%) and was declining at 24 hours in the other patient. Plasma creatinine was elevated (&gt; 120 &mu;mol/L) on enrolment in 17 (28%) patients, but was normal or falling in 16 (94%) at 48 hours and declining in the other patient by 72 hours. There was no clinically meaningful increase in plasma lactate or creatinine in any patient with a normal value on enrolment. Patients receiving fluid replacement with the conservative fluid replacement algorithm were more likely to survive than historical controls in the same hospitals who had received fluid replacement guided by clinical judgement in the year prior to the study (p = 0.03), despite having more severe disease (p &lt; 0.001).ConclusionsA conservative fluid resuscitation strategy appears safe in adults hospitalised with malaria

妊娠期における重金属暴露が出生アウトカム及び新生児の白血球テロメア長に与える影響 : ミャンマーにおける研究

学位の種別: 課程博士審査委員会委員 : （主査）東京大学教授 水口 雅, 東京大学准教授 馬淵 昭彦, 東京大学准教授 渡邊 洋一, 東京大学教授 松山 裕, 東京大学教授 佐々木 敏University of Tokyo(東京大学

Myanmar Warning Board Recognition System

In any country, warning text is described on the signboards or wallpapers to follow by everybody. This paper present Myanmar character recognition from various warning text signboards using block based pixel count and eight-directions chain code. Character recognition is the process of converting a printed or typewritten or handwritten text image file into editable and searchable text file. In this system, the characters on the warning signboard images are recognized using the hybrid eight direction chain code features and 16-blocks based pixel count features. Basically, there are three steps of character recognition such as character segmentation, feature extraction and classification. In segmentation step, horizontal cropping method is used for line segmentation, vertically cropping method and bounding box is used for connected component character segmentation. In the classification step, the performance accuracy is measured by two ways such as KNN (K’s Nearest Neivour) classifier and feature based approach of template matching on 150 warning text signboard images

Assessment of HIV testing among young methamphetamine users in Muse, Northern Shan State, Myanmar

Background Methamphetamine (MA) use has a strong correlation with risky sexual behaviors, and thus may be triggering the growing HIV epidemic in Myanmar. Although methamphetamine use is a serious public health concern, only a few studies have examined HIV testing among young drug users. This study aimed to examine how predisposing, enabling and need factors affect HIV testing among young MA users. Methods A cross-sectional study was conducted from January to March 2013 in Muse city in the Northern Shan State of Myanmar. Using a respondent-driven sampling method, 776 MA users aged 18-24 years were recruited. The main outcome of interest was whether participants had ever been tested for HIV. Descriptive statistics and multivariate logistic regression were applied in this study. Results Approximately 14.7% of young MA users had ever been tested for HIV. Significant positive predictors of HIV testing included predisposing factors such as being a female MA user, having had higher education, and currently living with one’s spouse/sexual partner. Significant enabling factors included being employed and having ever visited NGO clinics or met NGO workers. Significant need factors were having ever been diagnosed with an STI and having ever wanted to receive help to stop drug use. Conclusions Predisposing, enabling and need factors were significant contributors affecting uptake of HIV testing among young MA users. Integrating HIV testing into STI treatment programs, alongside general expansion of HIV testing services may be effective in increasing HIV testing uptake among young MA users

Time series analysis of demographic and temporal trends of tuberculosis in Singapore

Background: Singapore is an intermediate tuberculosis (TB) incidence country, with a recent rise in TB incidence from 2008, after a fall in incidence since 1998. This study identified population characteristics that were associated with the recent increase in TB cases, and built a predictive model of TB risk in Singapore. Methods: Retrospective time series analysis was used to study TB notification data collected from 1995 to 2011 from the Singapore Tuberculosis Elimination Program (STEP) registry. A predictive model was developed based on the data collected from 1995 to 2010 and validated using the data collected in 2011. Results: There was a significant difference in demographic characteristics between resident and non-resident TB cases. TB risk was higher in non-residents than in residents throughout the period. We found no significant association between demographic and macro-economic factors and annual incidence of TB with or without adjusting for the population-at-risk. Despite growing non-resident population, there was a significant decrease in the non-resident TB risk (p < 0.0001). However, there was no evidence of trend in the resident TB risk over this time period, though differences between different demographic groups were apparent with ethnic minorities experiencing higher incidence rates. Conclusion: The study found that despite an increasing size of non-resident population, TB risk among non-residents was decreasing at a rate of about 3% per year. There was an apparent seasonality in the TB reporting