Genetic parameters for quail body weights using a random regression model

A model including fixed and random linear regressions is described for analyzing body weights at different ages. In this study, (co)variance components, heritabilities for quail weekly weights and genetic correlations among these weights were estimated using a random regression model by DFREML under DXMRR option. Data of 1046 pedigreed quail were used. Individual live weights were obtained weekly from hatching to six weeks of age. Records for the same bird were taken as repeated measurements and single measurement error variance was assumed to be constant for all ages. Orthogonal polynomial regressions (on the Legendre scale) of sixth order were sufficient to model the additive genetic, phenotypic and permanent environmental (co)variances. Heritability estimates for ages were moderate, ranging from 0.007-0.61 and estimated measurement error variance was 9.60 g2. Correlations were found positive among weights. Genetic correlations were higher than phenotypic and permanent environmental correlations. The correlations between adjacent periods are more closely correlated than between remote periods. South African Journal of Animal Science Vol.34(2) 2004: 104-10

Comparison of DC Bead-irinotecan and DC Bead-topotecan drug eluting beads for use in locoregional drug delivery to treat pancreatic cancer

DC Bead is a drug delivery embolisation system that can be loaded with doxorubicin or irinotecan for the treatment of a variety of liver cancers. In this study we demonstrate that the topoisomerase I inhibitor topotecan hydrochloride can be successfully loaded into the DC Bead sulfonate-modified polyvinyl alcohol hydrogel matrix, resulting in a sustained-release drug eluting bead (DEBTOP) useful for therapeutic purposes. The in vitro drug loading capacity, elution characteristics and the effects on mechanical properties of the beads are described with reference to our previous work with irinotecan hydrochloride (DEBIRI). Results showed that drug loading was faster when the solution was agitated compared to static loading and a maximum loading of ca. 40–45 mg topotecan in 1 ml hydrated beads was achievable. Loading the drug into the beads altered the size, compressibility moduli and colour of the bead. Elution was shown to be reliant on the presence of ions to perform the necessary exchange with the electrostatically bound topotecan molecules. Topotecan was shown by MTS assay to have an IC50 for human pancreatic adenocarcinoma cells (PSN-1) of 0.22 and 0.27 lM compared to 28.1 and 19.2 lM for irinotecan at 48 and 72 h, respectively. The cytotoxic efficacy of DEBTOP on PSN-1 was compared to DEBIRI. DEPTOP loaded at 6 & 30 mg ml-1, like its free drug form, was shown to be more potent than DEBIRI of comparable doses at 24, 48 & 72 h using a slightly modified MTS assay. Using a PSN-1 mouse xenograft model, DEBIRI doses of 3.3–6.6 mg were shown to be well tolerated (even with repeat administration) and effective in reducing the tumour size. DEBTOP however, was lethal after 6 days at doses of 0.83–1.2 mg but demonstrated reasonable efficacy and tolerability (again with repeat injection possible) at 0.2–0.4 mg doses. Care must therefore be taken when selecting the dose of topotecan to be loaded into DC Bead given its greater potency and potential toxicity

A preliminary study in Wistar rats with enniatin : A contaminated feed

A 28-day repeated dose preliminary assay, using enniatin A naturally contaminated feed through microbial fermentation by a Fusarium tricinctum strain, was carried out employing two months-old female Wistar rats as in vivo experimental model. In order to simulate a physiological test of a toxic compound naturally produced by fungi, five treated animals were fed during twenty-eight days with fermented feed. As control group, five rats were fed with standard feed. At the 28th day, blood samples were collected for biochemical analysis and the gastrointestinal tract, liver and kidneys were removed from each rat for enniatin A detection and quantitation. Digesta were collected from stomach, duodenum, jejunum, ileum and colon. Enniatin A present in organs and in biological fluids was analyzed by liquid chromatography-diode array detector (LC-DAD) and confirmed by LC-mass spectrometry linear ion trap (MS-LIT); also several serum biochemical parameters and a histological analysis of the duodenal tract were performed. No adverse effects were found in any treated rat at the enniatin A concentration (20.91 mg/kg bw/day) tested during the 28-day experiment. Enniatin A quantitation in biological fluids ranged from 1.50 to 9.00 mg/kg, whereas in the gastrointestinal organs the enniatin A concentration ranged from 2.50 to 23.00 mg/kg. The high enniatin A concentration found in jejunum liquid and tissue points to them as an absorption area. Finally, two enniatin A degradation products were identified in duodenum, jejunum and colon content, probably produced by gut microflora

The polarizability model for ferroelectricity in perovskite oxides

This article reviews the polarizability model and its applications to ferroelectric perovskite oxides. The motivation for the introduction of the model is discussed and nonlinear oxygen ion polarizability effects and their lattice dynamical implementation outlined. While a large part of this work is dedicated to results obtained within the self-consistent-phonon approximation (SPA), also nonlinear solutions of the model are handled which are of interest to the physics of relaxor ferroelectrics, domain wall motions, incommensurate phase transitions. The main emphasis is to compare the results of the model with experimental data and to predict novel phenomena.Comment: 55 pages, 35 figure

Failure Analysis of a Welded Steel Pipe at Kullar Fault Crossing.

Cheng, Yin/0000-0001-5554-9832; Karamanos, Spyros A./0000-0003-0047-9173The seismic response of a 2200-mm-diameter welded steel pipe at strike slip Kullar fault crossing in Izmit, Kocaeli during 1999 Kocaeli earthquake is investigated. The pipe was crossing the fault-line with an angle of 55 degrees and suffered leaks due to 3.0 m of right lateral movement of fault, which imposed compressive axial strain in the pipe. The backfill material of the trench was native soil which was non-homogenous (soft and stiff clay) with respect to fault line-soft material on the North side, stiff material on the South side. Field observations revealed two major wrinkles with finger width cracks and a minor wrinkle on the soft soil side of the fault. Large plastic strains and local folding were observed at wrinkles due to compressive strains. The case is known as one of the best documented fault crossing examples. The failure behavior of the Thames water pipe during 1999 Kocaeli earthquake is simulated by utilizing a 3D nonlinear continuum FE model. The numerical model considers contact surface at soil pipe interface and performs large deformation analyses of the pipe. The locations of wrinkles as well as axial displacements/rotations demands due to fault rupture are predicted. It is observed that once wrinkle initiates, strain in the pipe away from the wrinkle reduces after initial local buckling and additional shortening of the pipeline tends to accumulate at the wrinkle causing large plastic strains and rotation demands associated with fault rupture, an observation consistent with field observations and 2005 ALA guidelines. (C) 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.Municipality of Kocaeli Water and Sewege Systems (ISU); STREST project (EU-FP7) [603389]; ISUThis research is supported by the General Directorate of Municipality of Kocaeli Water and Sewege Systems (ISU). The methodology used in this paper is an adaptation of the STREST project (EU-FP7 no. 603389) for hydrocarbon pipelines to ISU water transmission pipe. The valuable comments received from Prof. Drs. M. Erdik and S. Akkar of KOERI and support provided by the General Directorate of ISU are gratefully acknowledged

The influence of multiple meals on the gastric evacuation rate in rainbow trout (Oncorhynchus mykiss)

Rainbow trout, Oncorhynchus mykiss (mean weight 70.8+/-1.0 g SEM) raised in the Sea of Marmara (Turkey), were used for a preliminary gastric evacuation study. After being starved 72 hours, three groups of 110 fish, each, were fed ad libitum once, twice or three times in a single day. Ten fish from each group were withdrawn and killed in an anesthetic solution during each sampling at 0, 3, 6, 9, 12, 15, 18, 21, 24, 27 and 30 hours following the last feeding. Gastric material was removed from the fish and dried for gastric evacuation modelling. Gompertz and logistic models (with fixed asymptotes) best explained the data. The gastric emptying rate of the trout offered a single meal (Group A) was faster than those fed two (Group B) or three (Group C) meals while the emptying patterns of Groups B and C were similar to each other. The time required to evacuate 95% of the gastric material from the first meal was estimated as 54.3, 68.0 and 67.8 h for Groups A, B and C, respectively, according to the Gompertz equations (with a fixed asymptote)

HoughNet: Integrating Near and Long-Range Evidence for Bottom-Up Object Detection

© 2020, Springer Nature Switzerland AG.This paper presents HoughNet, a one-stage, anchor-free, voting-based, bottom-up object detection method. Inspired by the Generalized Hough Transform, HoughNet determines the presence of an object at a certain location by the sum of the votes cast on that location. Votes are collected from both near and long-distance locations based on a log-polar vote field. Thanks to this voting mechanism, HoughNet is able to integrate both near and long-range, class-conditional evidence for visual recognition, thereby generalizing and enhancing current object detection methodology, which typically relies on only local evidence. On the COCO dataset, HoughNet’s best model achieves 46.4 AP (and 65.1 AP50), performing on par with the state-of-the-art in bottom-up object detection and outperforming most major one-stage and two-stage methods. We further validate the effectiveness of our proposal in another task, namely, “labels to photo” image generation by integrating the voting module of HoughNet to two different GAN models and showing that the accuracy is significantly improved in both cases. Code is available at https://github.com/nerminsamet/houghnet

Foveated image processing for faster object detection and recognition in embedded systems using deep convolutional neural networks

Object detection and recognition algorithms using deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) tend to be computationally intensive to implement. This presents a particular challenge for embedded systems, such as mobile robots, where the computational resources tend to be far less than for workstations. As an alternative to standard, uniformly sampled images, we propose the use of foveated image sampling here to reduce the size of images, which are faster to process in a CNN due to the reduced number of convolution operations. We evaluate object detection and recognition on the Microsoft COCO database, using foveated image sampling at different image sizes, ranging from 416×416 to 96×96 pixels, on an embedded GPU – an NVIDIA Jetson TX2 with 256 CUDA cores. The results show that it is possible to achieve a 4× speed-up in frame rates, from 3.59 FPS to 15.24 FPS, using 416×416 and 128×128 pixel images respectively. For foveated sampling, this image size reduction led to just a small decrease in recall performance in the foveal region, to 92.0% of the baseline performance with full-sized images, compared to a significant decrease to 50.1% of baseline recall performance in uniformly sampled images, demonstrating the advantage of foveated sampling

Assessing Microstructural, Biomechanical, and Biocompatible Properties of TiNb Alloys for Potential Use as Load-Bearing Implants

Data Availability Statement: The original contributions given in this work are included in the article, further inquiries can be directed to the corresponding authors.Titanium-Niobium (TiNb) alloys are commonly employed in a number of implantable devices, yet concerns exist regarding their use in implantology owing to the biomechanical mismatch between the implant and the host tissue. Therefore, to balance the mechanical performance of the load-bearing implant with bone, TiNb alloys with differing porosities were fabricated by powder metallurgy combined with spacer material. Microstructures and phase constituents were characterized with energy dispersive spectroscopy (EDS), scanning electron microscopy (SEM), and X-ray diffraction (XRD). The mechanical properties were tested by uniaxial compression, and the corrosion performance was determined via a potentiodynamic polarization experiment. To evaluate a highly matched potential implant with the host, biocompatibilities such as cell viability and proliferation rate, fibronectin adsorption, plasmid-DNA interaction, and an SEM micrograph showing the cell morphology were examined in detail. The results showed that the alloys displayed open and closed pores with a uniform pore size and distribution, which allowed for cell adherence and other cellular activities. The alloys with low porosity displayed compressive strength between 618 MPa and 1295 MPa, while the alloys with high porosity showed significantly lower strength, ranging from 48 MPa to 331 MPa. The biological evaluation of the alloys demonstrated good cell attachment and proliferation rates.The EPSRC Future LiME Hub (EP/N007638/1); PhD studentship, the Republic of Turkey Ministry of National Education

KANSL3 directs transcriptional programs essential for hepatic metabolism and differentiation

Liver disease is a leading cause of mortality worldwide. Emerging evidence highlights the significant role of epigenetic regulation in sustaining liver homeostasis, providing new therapeutic strategies for liver disease. Hepatocyte-specific deletion of the epigenetic regulator KANSL3, a key component of the NSL complex, results in early-onset liver disease marked by biliary hyperplasia and hepatic fibrosis. KANSL3 is essential for regulating hepatocyte transcriptional networks important for hepatic steroid and lipid metabolism through histone acetylation. Moreover, single-cell RNA sequencing demonstrated that the loss of KANSL3 disrupts the differentiation of hepatocytes in vivo. The transcriptional programs necessary for hepatocyte differentiation of ductal and fetal liver organoids were severely compromised in the absence of KANSL3. These findings collectively demonstrate a crucial role of the epigenetic regulator KANSL3 in hepatocyte differentiation in liver development and disease