B792: The Development of the Ability to Select for Increased Milk Production: The Jersey Dairy Cow in Maine, 1900-1984

Histories of dairying and dairy farming usually pass over one very important topic, the point of origin herself: the dairy cow. In the past 150 years, the period associated with the rise of commercial dairying in the U.S., she has not been a static creature. The story of her development is an important and exciting part of the history of dairying, but this development cannot be explained by such phrases as feeding and management improved or breeding improved . Since the dairy cow of the 1980s is not the same dairy cow of the 1830s, we should understand how this transition occurred and why it is important.https://digitalcommons.library.umaine.edu/aes_bulletin/1128/thumbnail.jp

Estimating the protection afforded by foot-and-mouth disease vaccines in the laboratory

Foot-and-mouth disease (FMD) vaccines must be carefully selected and their application closely monitored to optimise their effectiveness. This review covers serological techniques for FMD vaccine quality control, including potency testing, vaccine matching and post-vaccination monitoring. It also discusses alternative laboratory procedures, such as antigen quantification and nucleotide sequencing, and briefly compares the approaches for FMD with those for measuring protection against influenza virus, where humoral immunity is also important. Serology is widely used to predict the protection afforded by vaccines and has great practical utility but also limitations. Animals differ in their responses to vaccines and in the protective mechanisms that they develop. Antibodies have a variety of properties and tests differ in what they measure. Antibody-virus interactions may vary between virus serotypes and strains and protection may be affected by the vaccination regime and the nature and timing of field virus challenge. Finally, tests employing biological reagents are difficult to standardise, whilst cross-protection data needed for test calibration and validation are scarce. All of this is difficult to reconcile with the desire for simple and universal criteria and thresholds for evaluating vaccines and vaccination responses and means that oversimplification of test procedures and their interpretation can lead to poor predictions. A holistic approach is therefore recommended, considering multiple sources of field, experimental and laboratory data. New antibody avidity and isotype tests seem promising alternatives to evaluate cross-protective, post-vaccination serological responses, taking account of vaccine potency as well as match. After choosing appropriate serological tests or test combinations and cut-offs, results should be interpreted cautiously and in context. Since opportunities for experimental challenge studies of cross-protection are limited and the approaches incompletely reflect real life, more field studies are needed to quantify cross-protection and its correlation to in vitro measurements

Site Fidelity, Philopatry, and Survival of Promiscuous Saltmarsh Sharp-Tailed Sparrows in Rhode Island

We investigated site fidelity and apparent survival in a promiscuous population of Saltmarsh Sharp-tailed Sparrows (Ammodramus caudacutus) in southern Rhode Island. Based on capture–recapture histories of 446 color-banded sparrows studied from 1993 to 1998 at our primary study site, Galilee, we observed significant variation in apparent survival rates among years, but not between sexes. Return rates of adult males (37.6%) and females (35.6%) were not significantly different during any year. Juveniles exhibited high return rates, ranging from 0 to 44%, with males (61% of returns) more likely to return than females (35%). In addition, we monitored movements of 404 color-banded sparrows at nine satellite marshes in 1997 and 1998, which supported our findings at Galilee and documented intermarsh movements by 10% of all banded birds. Lack of gender-bias in adult dispersal and strong natal philopatry of sparrows in Rhode Island occurs regularly among passerines possessing a variety of mating systems. Despite emancipation from parental and resource defense duties, adult male Saltmarsh Sharp-tailed Sparrows exhibited apparent survival rates similar to adult females. Availability of high-quality breeding habitat, which is patchy and saturated, may be the most important factor limiting dispersal for Saltmarsh Sharp-tailed Sparrows in Rhode Island

IRE1β negatively regulates IRE1α signaling in response to endoplasmic reticulum stress

IRE1β is an ER stress sensor uniquely expressed in epithelial cells lining mucosal surfaces. Here, we show that intestinal epithelial cells expressing IRE1β have an attenuated unfolded protein response to ER stress. When modeled in HEK293 cells and with purified protein, IRE1β diminishes expression and inhibits signaling by the closely related stress sensor IRE1α. IRE1β can assemble with and inhibit IRE1α to suppress stress-induced XBP1 splicing, a key mediator of the unfolded protein response. In comparison to IRE1α, IRE1β has relatively weak XBP1 splicing activity, largely explained by a nonconserved amino acid in the kinase domain active site that impairs its phosphorylation and restricts oligomerization. This enables IRE1β to act as a dominant-negative suppressor of IRE1α and affect how barrier epithelial cells manage the response to stress at the host–environment interface

Undergraduate teaching in geriatric medicine: mapping the British Geriatrics Society undergraduate curriculum to Tomorrow's Doctors 2009

Introduction: in 2008, the British Geriatrics Society (BGS) developed the Recommended Undergraduate Curriculum in Geriatric Medicine. This was subsequently mapped to the second edition of Tomorrows' Doctors (TD2, 2003). Following the publication of the third edition of Tomorrow's Doctors in 2009 (TD3), the mapping exercise was repeated to verify the extent to which the updated General Medical Council recommendations supported teaching in ageing and geriatric medicine. Method: we analysed TD3 and identified 48 aspects of its general guidance that were relevant to the teaching of medicine for older people. We then mapped these to the 2009 BGS curriculum. Results: the BGS curriculum was supported in full by TD3. However, learning outcomes relating to the interpretation and conduct of research in TD3 had no corresponding outcomes in the BGS curriculum. Conclusion: the BGS curriculum for medical undergraduates continues to provide a specific and complete list of learning objectives, all of which could help to operationalise the general statements made in TD3 with relation to ageing and geriatric medicine. Learning outcomes in research in frail older patients have been added following this mapping exercise

Three-body dispersion-relation N/D equations for the coupled decay channels ppbar (J^{PC}=0^{-+}) --> pi^0 pi^0 pi^0, eta pi^0 pi^0, eta eta pi^0, K Kbar pi^0

During several years the data on different channels ppbar (J^{PC}=0^{-+}) --> 3 mesons presented by Crystal Barrel Collaboration were successfully analyzed by extracting the leading amplitude singularities - pole singularities - with the aim to obtain information about two-meson resonances. But these analyses do not take into account three-body final state interactions (FSI) in an explicitly correct way. This paper is devoted to the consideration of this problem.Comment: 16 pages, no figure

An Intercomparison of Ground-based Solar FTIR Measurements of Atmospheric Gases at Eureka, Canada

We report the results of an intercomparison of vertical column amounts of hydrogen chloride (HCl), hydrogen fluoride (HF), nitrous oxide (N2O), nitric acid (HNO3), methane (CH4), ozone (O3), carbon dioxide (CO2) and nitrogen (N2) derived from the spectra recorded by two ground-based Fourier transform infrared (FTIR) spectrometers operated side-by-side using the sun as a source. The procedure used to record spectra and derive vertical column amounts follows the format of previous instrument intercomparisons organised by the Network for Detection of Atmospheric Composition Change (NDACC), formerly known as the Network for Detection of Stratospheric Change (NDSC). For most gases the differences were typically around 3% and in about half of the results the error bars given by the standard deviation of the measurements from each instrument did not overlap. The worst level of agreement was for HF where differences of over 5% were typical. The level of agreement achieved during this intercomparison is a little worse than that achieved in previous intercomparisons between ground-based FTIR spectrometers