1,553 research outputs found
Effective Use of Slaughter Checks for Identification and Control of Swine Disease
Swine producers, individually and as an industry are faced with numerous and complicated challenges. It is a\u3e dynamic industi^^,. .One area of interaction within tiie infrast^cture-is that of.animal health.^lere are m^ny. diseases known to affect swihe and their production efficiencies,, These diseases Impact producers and the industry in numerous, interrelated ways ., Severe animal disease can cause producersā¢to dramatically limit or even halt,production [1]. Disease can be clinical or subclinical.. Clinical disease is easily observable and actions can be taken to reduce its level; However, many swine diseases are subclinical and are riot visually observableFor subclinical disease, detection and accurate diagnoses in the live animal can be difficult.;-,.Yet these diseases can result in significant reductions in\u27animal efficiency and.^roduqef, losse
Determination of Swine Pneumonia and Impacts on Production Costs Through Slaughter Checks
Livestock producers are continually faced with decisions on animal health maintenance. Surveillance*of animals for disease symptoms enables producers to more successfully deal with these events and effectively evaluate disease prevention and treatment programs
A versatile nuclei extraction protocol for single nucleus sequencing in non-model species ā optimization in various Atlantic salmon tissues
The use of single cell sequencing technologies has exploded over recent years, and is now commonly used in many non-model species. Sequencing nuclei instead of whole cells has become increasingly popular, as it does not require the processing of samples immediately after collection. Here we present a highly effective nucleus isolation protocol that outperforms previously available method in challenging samples in a non-model specie. This protocol can be successfully applied to extract nuclei from a variety of tissues and species
Recommended from our members
PPARĪ±-independent effects of nitrate supplementation on skeletal muscle metabolism in hypoxia
Hypoxia is a feature of many disease states where convective
oxygen delivery is impaired, and is known to suppress oxidative
metabolism. Acclimation to hypoxia thus requires metabolic remodelling,
however hypoxia tolerance may be aided by dietary nitrate
supplementation. Nitrate improves tissue oxygenation and has been shown
to modulate skeletal muscle tissue metabolism via transcriptional
changes, including through the activation of peroxisome proliferator-
activated receptor alpha (PPARĪ±), a master regulator of fat metabolism.
Here we investigated whether nitrate supplementation protects skeletal
muscle mitochondrial function in hypoxia and whether PPARĪ± is required
for this effect. Wild-type and PPARĪ± knockout (PPARĪ±-/-) mice were
supplemented with sodium nitrate via the drinking water or sodium
chloride as control, and exposed to environmental hypoxia (10% O2) or
normoxia for 4 weeks. Hypoxia suppressed mitochondrial respiratory
function in mouse soleus, an effect partially alleviated through nitrate
supplementation, but occurring independently of PPARĪ±. Specifically,
hypoxia resulted in 26% lower mass specific fatty acid-supported LEAK
respiration and 23% lower pyruvate-supported oxidative phosphorylation
capacity. Hypoxia also resulted in 24% lower citrate synthase activity in
mouse soleus, possibly indicating a loss of mitochondrial content. These
changes were not seen, however, in hypoxic mice when supplemented with
dietary nitrate, indicating a nitrate dependent preservation of
mitochondrial function. Moreover, this was observed in both wild-type and
PPARĪ±-/- mice. Our results support the notion that nitrate
supplementation can aid hypoxia tolerance and indicate that nitrate can
exert effects independently of PPARĪ±.This work was supported by Kingās College London, the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Councils [grant number: BB/F016581/1] and the Research Councils UK [grant number:
EP/E500552/1]
Detection and characterisation of bone destruction in murine rheumatoid arthritis using statistical shape models
Rheumatoid arthritis (RA) is an autoimmune disease in which chronic inflammation of the synovial joints can lead to destruction of cartilage and bone. Pre-clinical studies attempt to uncover the underlying causes by emulating the disease in genetically different mouse strains and characterising the nature and severity of bone shape changes as indicators of pathology. This paper presents a fully automated method for obtaining quantitative measurements of bone destruction from volumetric micro-CT images of a mouse hind paw. A statistical model of normal bone morphology derived from a training set of healthy examples serves as a template against which a given pathological sample is compared. Abnormalities in bone shapes are identified as deviations from the model statistics, characterised in terms of type (erosion / formation) and quantified in terms of severity (percentage affected bone area). The colour-coded magnitudes of the deviations superimposed on a three-dimensional rendering of the paw show at a glance the severity of malformations for the individual bones and joints. With quantitative data it is possible to derive population statistics characterising differences in bone malformations for different mouse strains and in different anatomical regions. The method was applied to data acquired from three different mouse strains. The derived quantitative indicators of bone destruction have shown agreement both with the subjective visual scores and with the previous biological findings. This suggests that pathological bone shape changes can be usefully and objectively identified as deviations from the model statistics
From FAANG to Fork: Application of Highly Annotated Genomes to Improve Farmed Animal Production
Here we review and describe a set of research priorities to meet present and future challenges posed to farmed animal production that build on progress, successes and resources from the Functional Annotation of ANimal Genomes (FAANG) project
PPARĪ±-independent effects of nitrate supplementation on skeletal muscle metabolism in hypoxia
Automated pipeline for rapid production and screening of HIV-specific monoclonal antibodies using pichia pastoris
Monoclonal antibodies (mAbs) that bind and neutralize human pathogens have great therapeutic potential. Advances in automated screening and liquid handling have resulted in the ability to discover antigen-specific antibodies either directly from human blood or from various
combinatorial libraries (phage, bacteria or yeast). There remain, however, bottlenecks in the cloning, expression and evaluation of such lead antibodies identified in primary screens that hinder high-throughput screening. As such, āhit-to-lead identificationā remains both expensive and
time-consuming. By combining the advantages of overlap extension PCR (OE-PCR) and a genetically stable yet easily manipulatable microbial expression host Pichia pastoris, we have developed an automated pipeline for the rapid production and screening of full-length antigenspecific
mAbs. Here, we demonstrate the speed, feasibility and cost-effectiveness of our approach by generating several broadly neutralizing antibodies against human immunodeficiency virus (HIV).Bill & Melinda Gates FoundationUnited States. Defense Advanced Research Projects AgencySpace and Naval Warfare Systems Center San Diego (U.S.) (Contract N66001-13-C-4025)W. M. Keck FoundationNational Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (U.S.) (U19AI090970).National Cancer Institute (U.S.) (David H. Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research at MIT. Support (Core) Grant P30-CA14051
Semantic inferentialism as (a form of) active externalism
Within contemporary philosophy of mind, it is taken for granted that externalist accounts of meaning and mental content are, in principle, orthogonal to the matter of whether cognition itself is bound within the biological brain or whether it can constitutively include parts of the world. Accordingly, Clark and Chalmers (Analysis 58(1):7ā19, 1998) distinguish these varieties of externalism as āpassiveā and āactiveā respectively. The aim here is to suggest that we should resist the received way of thinking about these dividing lines. With reference to Brandomās (1994, 2000, Inquiry 47:236ā253, 2008) broad semantic inferentialism, we show that a theory of meaning can be at the same time a variety of active externalism. While we grant that supporters of other varieties of content externalism (e.g., Putnam 1975 and Burge (Philosophical Review 95:3ā45, 1986) can deny active externalism, this is not an
option for semantic inferentialists: On this latter view, the role of the environment (both in its social and natural form) is not āpassiveā in the sense assumed by the alternative approaches to content externalism
Recommended from our members
Inorganic nitrate, hypoxia, and the regulation of cardiac mitochondrial respiration-probing the role of PPARĪ±.
Dietary inorganic nitrate prevents aspects of cardiac mitochondrial dysfunction induced by hypoxia, although the mechanism is not completely understood. In both heart and skeletal muscle, nitrate increases fatty acid oxidation capacity, and in the latter case, this involves up-regulation of peroxisome proliferator-activated receptor (PPAR)Ī± expression. Here, we investigated whether dietary nitrate modifies mitochondrial function in the hypoxic heart in a PPARĪ±-dependent manner. Wild-type (WT) mice and mice without PPARĪ± (Ppara-/-) were given water containing 0.7 mM NaCl (control) or 0.7 mM NaNO3 for 35 d. After 7 d, mice were exposed to normoxia or hypoxia (10% O2) for the remainder of the study. Mitochondrial respiratory function and metabolism were assessed in saponin-permeabilized cardiac muscle fibers. Environmental hypoxia suppressed mass-specific mitochondrial respiration and additionally lowered the proportion of respiration supported by fatty acid oxidation by 18% (P < 0.001). This switch away from fatty acid oxidation was reversed by nitrate treatment in hypoxic WT but not Ppara-/- mice, indicating a PPARĪ±-dependent effect. Hypoxia increased hexokinase activity by 33% in all mice, whereas lactate dehydrogenase activity increased by 71% in hypoxic WT but not Ppara-/- mice. Our findings indicate that PPARĪ± plays a key role in mediating cardiac metabolic remodeling in response to both hypoxia and dietary nitrate supplementation.-Horscroft, J. A., O'Brien, K. A., Clark, A. D., Lindsay, R. T., Steel, A. S., Procter, N. E. K., Devaux, J., Frenneaux, M., Harridge, S. D. R., Murray, A. J. Inorganic nitrate, hypoxia, and the regulation of cardiac mitochondrial respiration-probing the role of PPARĪ±
- ā¦