Grapevine germplasm collections of Switzerland

Special Issu

The effect of replacing inorganic trace minerals with organic Bioplex® and Sel-Plex® on the performance and meat quality of broilers

The aim of this study was to compare the performance and carcass quality of broilers fed diets containing either a commercial inorganic mineral premix (control) or organic trace minerals (OTM) (Sel-Plex® (Se) and Bioplex® copper (Cu), zinc (Zn), manganese (Mn) and iron (Fe)) in a commercial environment. Four identical houses with a total of 119,500 mixed-sex broiler chickens were used (two treatments×two replicates). Birds were fed identical corn/soybean based rations differing only in mineral form and levels. The inorganic treatment (control) provided Cu, Zn, Fe, Mn and Se at levels of 8, 44, 55, 66 and 0.2ppm, respectively. The OTM contained 5.5, 22, 5.5, 22 and 0.3ppm of Cu, Zn, Fe, Mn and Se respectively. Growth and feed conversion during the 35-day trial were not influenced (P>0.05) by treatments. Over the entire trial period and during the first week of production, birds showed significantly lower (P<0.05) mortality with the OTM treatment. Between 14 and 31 days, sudden death syndrome was lower (P<0.05) with the OTM diet. OTM improved feathering at 21 days of age (P<0.001) and lowered carcass skin tearing (P<0.05). There was no effect of OTM on carcass yield, breast meat pH, drip loss or on meat colour (L* and b* values). However, birds fed organic minerals had redder breast meat (a*) (P<0.05) on days three and five after slaughter. The results showed that, under commercial conditions, using lower levels of OTM (except Se) in feed relative to inorganic controls can maintain broiler performanc

Quantum teleportation on a photonic chip

Quantum teleportation is a fundamental concept in quantum physics which now finds important applications at the heart of quantum technology including quantum relays, quantum repeaters and linear optics quantum computing (LOQC). Photonic implementations have largely focussed on achieving long distance teleportation due to its suitability for decoherence-free communication. Teleportation also plays a vital role in the scalability of photonic quantum computing, for which large linear optical networks will likely require an integrated architecture. Here we report the first demonstration of quantum teleportation in which all key parts - entanglement preparation, Bell-state analysis and quantum state tomography - are performed on a reconfigurable integrated photonic chip. We also show that a novel element-wise characterisation method is critical to mitigate component errors, a key technique which will become increasingly important as integrated circuits reach higher complexities necessary for quantum enhanced operation.Comment: Originally submitted version - refer to online journal for accepted manuscript; Nature Photonics (2014