Cooling the Swine Herd With a Thermostat-Timer Controlled Sprinkling System.

2 p

Interrater Reliability in Toxicity Identification: Limitations of Current Standards.

PurposeThe National Cancer Institute Common Terminology Criteria for Adverse Events (CTCAE) v5.0 is the standard for oncology toxicity encoding and grading, despite limited validation. We assessed interrater reliability (IRR) in multireviewer toxicity identification.Methods and materialsTwo reviewers independently reviewed 100 randomly selected notes for weekly on-treatment visits during radiation therapy from the electronic health record. Discrepancies were adjudicated by a third reviewer for consensus. Term harmonization was performed to account for overlapping symptoms in CTCAE. IRR was assessed based on unweighted and weighted Cohen's kappa coefficients.ResultsBetween reviewers, the unweighted kappa was 0.68 (95% confidence interval, 0.65-0.71) and the weighted kappa was 0.59 (0.22-1.00). IRR was consistent between symptoms noted as present or absent with a kappa of 0.6 (0.66-0.71) and 0.6 (0.65-0.69), respectively.ConclusionsSignificant discordance suggests toxicity identification, particularly retrospectively, is a complex and error-prone task. Strategies to minimize IRR, including training and simplification of the CTCAE criteria, should be considered in trial design and future terminologies

Cooling the Swine Herd With a Thermostat-Timer Controlled Sprinkling System.

2 p

Swine Herd Health.

4 p

Selecting Meatier Hogs.

12 p

Tips for Swine Management.

3 p

Crossbreeding for Commercial Pork Production.

3 p

Swine Herd Health.

4 p

Kanamycin resistance during in vitro development of pollen from transgenic tomato plants

Effects of kanamycin on pollen germination and tube growth of pollen from non-transformed plants and from transgenic tomato plants containing a chimaeric kanamycin resistance gene were determined. Germination of pollen was not affected by the addition of kanamycin to the medium in both genotypes. Kanamycin, however, severely affected tube growth of pollen from non-transformed plants, while pollen from plants containing the chimaeric gene were less sensitive and produced significantly longer tubes at kanamycin concentrations between 200-400 mg l-1. Apparently, this resistance for kanamycin correlates with the expression of the chimaeric gene during male gametophytic development.

Tomato: a crop species amenable to improvement by cellular and molecular methods

Tomato is a crop plant with a relatively small DNA content per haploid genome and a well developed genetics. Plant regeneration from explants and protoplasts is feasable which led to the development of efficient transformation procedures. In view of the current data, the isolation of useful mutants at the cellular level probably will be of limited value in the genetic improvement of tomato. Protoplast fusion may lead to novel combinations of organelle and nuclear DNA (cybrids), whereas this technique also provides a means of introducing genetic information from alien species into tomato. Important developments have come from molecular approaches. Following the construction of an RFLP map, these RFLP markers can be used in tomato to tag quantitative traits bred in from related species. Both RFLP's and transposons are in the process of being used to clone desired genes for which no gene products are known. Cloned genes can be introduced and potentially improve specific properties of tomato especially those controlled by single genes. Recent results suggest that, in principle, phenotypic mutants can be created for cloned and characterized genes and will prove their value in further improving the cultivated tomato.