Swine Dysentery: Practical Observations, Control And Diagnostics

Swine dysentery is a severe mucohemorrhagic enteric disease of pigs which has a large impact on pig production, with important losses caused by mortality and suboptimal performance. The causative agent is Brachyspirahyodysenteriae. The aim of the paper was to evaluate all the available data on B. hyodysenteriae presence on swine farms in Vojvodina region. The material for this research included five swine farms, where certain disorders and health problems in weaned, grower and fattening pigs were detected. Depending on the specificity of each evaluated case and available material, the applied research methods included: anamnestical and clinical evaluation, gross pathological examination, standard bacteriological testing for detection of the presence of aerobic and anaerobic bacteria in the tissue samples derived from diseased and/or died pigs. Besides this, in some cases the molecular diagnostic method (RT-PCR) was included. Swine dysentery is a common and important endemic problem in many swine farms in Vojvodina. On endemically infected swine farms transmission mainly occurs by ingestion of infected faeces. All the observed factors affecting disease persistence and transmission on the farm are thoroughly analysed and discussed. Finally, current prophylactic and therapeutic approaches to fight against disease are described

Correlation between acoustic divergence and phylogenetic distance in soniferous European gobiids (Gobiidae; Gobius lineage)

In fish, species identity can be encoded by sounds, which have been thoroughly investigated in European gobiids (Gobiidae, Gobius lineage). Recent evolutionary studies suggest that deterministic and/or stochastic forces could generate acoustic differences among related animal species, though this has not been investigated in any teleost group to date. In the present comparative study, we analysed the sounds from nine soniferous gobiids and quantitatively assessed their acoustic variability. Our interspecific acoustic study, incorporating for the first time the representative acoustic signals from the majority of soniferous gobiids, suggested that their sounds are truly species-specific (92% of sounds correctly classified into exact species) and each taxon possesses a unique set of spectro-temporal variables. In addition, we reconstructed phylogenetic relationships from a concatenated molecular dataset consisting of multiple molecular markers to track the evolution of acoustic signals in soniferous gobiids. The results of this study indicated that the genus Padogobius is polyphyletic, since P. nigricans was nested within the Ponto-Caspian clade, while the congeneric P. bonelli turned out to be a sister taxon to the remaining investigated soniferous species. Lastly, by extracting the acoustic and genetic distance matrices, sound variability and genetic distance were correlated for the first time to assess whether sound evolution follows a similar phylogenetic pattern. The positive correlation between the sound variability and genetic distance obtained here emphasizes that certain acoustic features from representative sounds could carry the phylogenetic signal in soniferous gobiids. Our study was the first attempt to evaluate the mutual relationship between acoustic variation and genetic divergence in any teleost fish

The two sides of cytokine signaling and glaucomatous optic neuropathy

The mechanistic study of glaucoma pathogenesis has shifted to seeking to understand the effects of immune responses on retinal ganglion cell damage and protection. Cytokines are the hormonal factors that mediate most of the biological effects in both the immune and nonimmune systems. CD4-expressing T helper cells are a major source of cytokine production and regulation. Type 1 helper T (Th1) cells are characterized by the production of proinflammatory cytokines such as interferon-gamma, interleukin (IL)-2, IL-12, IL-23, and tumor necrosis factor-alpha while type 2 helper T (Th2) cells are characterized by the production of IL-4, IL-5, IL-6, and IL-10. The balance of Th1/Th2 cytokine production influences many pathological processes and plays both causative and protective roles in neuron damages. Growing evidence indicates that imbalances of Th1/Th2 cytokine production are involved in neural damage or protection in many neurological diseases. In this review, we discuss the possible roles of Th1/Th2 cytokine production and imbalance of Th1/Th2 cytokines in retina, especially glaucomatous optic neuropathy