Reducing Campylobacter jejuni colonization in broiler chickens by in-feed supplementation with hyperimmune egg yolk antibodies

Campylobacter infections sourced mainly to poultry products, are the most important bacterial foodborne zoonoses worldwide. No effective measures to control these infections in broiler production exist to date. Here, we used passive immunization with hyperimmune egg yolks to confer broad protection of broilers against Campylobacter infection. Two novel vaccines, a bacterin of thirteen Campylobacter jejuni (C. jejuni) and C. coli strains and a subunit vaccine of six immunodominant Campylobacter antigens, were used for the immunization of layers, resulting in high and prolonged levels of specific immunoglobulinY (IgY) in the hens' yolks. In the first in vivo trial, yolks (sham, bacterin or subunit vaccine derived) were administered prophylactically in the broiler feed. Both the bacterin and subunit vaccine-induced IgY significantly reduced the number of Campylobacter-colonized broilers. In the second in vivo trial, the yolks were administered therapeutically during three days before euthanasia. The bacterin IgY resulted in a significant decrease in C. jejuni counts per infected bird. The hyperimmune yolks showed strong reactivity to a broad representation of C. jejuni and C. coli clonal complexes. These results indicate that passive immunization with hyperimmune yolks, especially bacterin derived, offers possibilities to control Campylobacter colonization in poultry

Subjectivity in Clone Judgment: Can We Ever Agree?

An objective definition of what a code clone is currently eludes the field. A small study was performed at an international workshop to elicit judgments and discussions from world experts regarding what characteristics define a code clone. Less than half of the clone candidates judged had 80% agreement amongst the judges. Judges appeared to differ primarily in their criteria for judgment rather than their interpretation of the clone candidates. In subsequent open discussion the judges provided several reasons for their judgments. The study casts additional doubt on the reliability of experimental results in the field when the full criterion for clone judgment is not spelled out

A model for the degradation of polyimides due to oxidation

Polyimides, due to their superior mechanical behavior at high temperatures, are used in a variety of applications that include aerospace, automobile and electronic packaging industries, as matrices for composites, as adhesives etc. In this paper, we extend our previous model in [S. Karra, K. R. Rajagopal, Modeling the non-linear viscoelastic response of high temperature polyimides, Mechanics of Materials, In press, doi:10.1016/j.mechmat.2010.09.006], to include oxidative degradation of these high temperature polyimides. Appropriate forms for the Helmholtz potential and the rate of dissipation are chosen to describe the degradation. The results for a specific boundary value problem, using our model compares well with the experimental creep data for PMR-15 resin that is aged in air.Comment: 13 pages, 2 figures, submitted to Mechanics of Time-dependent Material

Bond graph modelling of chemoelectrical energy transduction

Energy-based bond graph modelling of biomolecular systems is extended to include chemoelectrical transduction thus enabling integrated thermodynamically-compliant modelling of chemoelectrical systems in general and excitable membranes in particular. Our general approach is illustrated by recreating a well-known model of an excitable membrane. This model is used to investigate the energy consumed during a membrane action potential thus contributing to the current debate on the trade-off between the speed of an action potential event and energy consumption. The influx of Na+ is often taken as a proxy for energy consumption; in contrast, this paper presents an energy based model of action potentials. As the energy based approach avoids the assumptions underlying the proxy approach it can be directly used to compute energy consumption in both healthy and diseased neurons. These results are illustrated by comparing the energy consumption of healthy and degenerative retinal ganglion cells using both simulated and in vitro data

What Does It Take to Develop a Million Lines of Open Source Code?

This article presents a preliminary and exploratory study of the relationship between size, on the one hand, and effort, duration and team size, on the other, for 11 Free/Libre/Open Source Software (FLOSS) projects with current size ranging between between 0.6 and 5.3 million lines of code (MLOC). Effort was operationalised based on the number of active committers per month. The extracted data did not fit well an early version of the closed-source cost estimation model COCOMO for proprietary software, overall suggesting that, at least to some extent, FLOSS communities are more productive than closedsource teams. This also motivated the need for FLOSS-specific effort models. As a first approximation, we evaluated 16 linear regression models involving different pairs of attributes. One of our experiments was to calculate the net size, that is, to remove any suspiciously large outliers or jumps in the growth trends. The best model we found involved effort against net size, accounting for 79 percent of the variance. This model was based on data excluding a possible outlier (Eclipse), the largest project in our sample. This suggests that different effort models may be needed for certain categories of FLOSS projects. Incidentally, for each of the 11 individual FLOSS projects we were able to model the net size trends with very high accuracy (R 2 ≥ 0.98). Of the 11 projects, 3 have grown superlinearly, 5 linearly and 3 sublinearly, suggesting that in the majority of the cases accumulated complexity is either well controlled or don't constitute a growth constraining factor

Space Charge at Nanoscale: Probing Injection and Dynamic Phenomena Under Dark/Light Configurations by Using KPFM and C-AFM

International audienc

Lettre à Émile VERHAEREN.

A propos d'Hélène de Sparte et de son propre travail /Marthe VERHAEREN/ Maria VAN RYSSELBERGHE