INVESTIGATION OF ACUTE STRESS IMPACT ON NURSERY PIG GASTROINTESTINAL FUNCTION AND ABILITY OF BIOACTIVE COMPONENTS OF GARLIC TO MITIGATE STRESS-INDUCED PHYSIOLOGICAL CHANGES

Experiments were conducted to determine the effect of post-weaning feed and water deprivation on nursery pig growth performance, gastrointestinal function, and ability of garlic-derived diallyl disulfide (DADS) and diallyl trisulfide (DATS) to mitigate deprivation-induced effects. For the first experiment, the effects of a 24-h post-weaning feed, water, or feed + water deprivation event on nursery pig growth and intestinal characteristics were determined. Water deprivation more severely impacted nursery pig growth and intestinal measurements compared to feed deprivation. The water deprivation event resulted in an increase in serum stress markers and altered intestinal morphology and tight junction gene expression during the first week post-weaning. Furthermore, the acute post-weaning deprivation event impacted growth performance throughout the nursery period and resulted in pigs 0.57 kg lighter at 28 d post-weaning. A second experiment examined the interaction between a 24-h post-weaning feed + water deprivation event and a subsequent cyclic heat stress event. The results showed that the feed + water deprivation event reduced growth performance, increased serum stress markers, decreased ileal morphology, and altered intestinal tight junction gene expression similar to the first experiment. Growth performance and intestinal tight junction gene expression were decreased during the heat stress period. Growth performance results showed a stress event interaction in which nursery pig performance was poorest in pigs exposed to both stress events. Next, an in-vitro experiment was conducted to determine if garlic-derived DADS + DATS could mitigate hydrogen peroxide- and LPS-induced oxidant and endotoxin stress, respectively, in porcine epithelial (IPEC-J2) cells. Results showed that the garlic-derived compounds could mitigate oxidative stress by increasing superoxide dismutase and catalase activity. Furthermore, DADS + DATS were immune modulatory and augmented the LPS-induced increase in interleukin 8 (IL-8) secretion. Following the in-vitro evaluation, two in-vivo pilot trials were conducted to identify the optimal dosage of DADS + DATS and to evaluate the effect of graded doses of DADS + DATS on nursery pig and broiler chicken performance and gastrointestinal function. Garlic-derived DADS + DATS were supplemented to pigs and chickens by daily oral gavage for a period of 6 d. The oral gavage of DATS + DATS did not impact nursery pig growth performance, although ileal villus height was increased. Furthermore, there was a linear increase in IL-8 and a decrease in zonula occludens 1 (ZO-1) ileal gene expression due to oral DADS + DATS administration. The optimal dosage of DATS + DATS to maximize ileal villus height was determined to be 1.7 mg per kg BW. For the broiler chicken trial, DADS + DATS supplementation by oral gavage improved BW gain, ileal morphology

Learning Shape Priors for Single-View 3D Completion and Reconstruction

The problem of single-view 3D shape completion or reconstruction is challenging, because among the many possible shapes that explain an observation, most are implausible and do not correspond to natural objects. Recent research in the field has tackled this problem by exploiting the expressiveness of deep convolutional networks. In fact, there is another level of ambiguity that is often overlooked: among plausible shapes, there are still multiple shapes that fit the 2D image equally well; i.e., the ground truth shape is non-deterministic given a single-view input. Existing fully supervised approaches fail to address this issue, and often produce blurry mean shapes with smooth surfaces but no fine details. In this paper, we propose ShapeHD, pushing the limit of single-view shape completion and reconstruction by integrating deep generative models with adversarially learned shape priors. The learned priors serve as a regularizer, penalizing the model only if its output is unrealistic, not if it deviates from the ground truth. Our design thus overcomes both levels of ambiguity aforementioned. Experiments demonstrate that ShapeHD outperforms state of the art by a large margin in both shape completion and shape reconstruction on multiple real datasets.Comment: ECCV 2018. The first two authors contributed equally to this work. Project page: http://shapehd.csail.mit.edu

Food-Associated Stress Primes Foodborne Pathogens for the Gastrointestinal Phase of Infection

The incidence of foodborne outbreaks and product recalls is on the rise. The ability of the pathogen to adapt and survive under stressful environments of food processing and the host gastrointestinal tract may contribute to increasing foodborne illnesses. In the host, multiple factors such as bacteriolytic enzymes, acidic pH, bile, resident microflora, antimicrobial peptides, and innate and adaptive immune responses are essential in eliminating pathogens. Likewise, food processing and preservation techniques are employed to eliminate or reduce human pathogens load in food. However, sub-lethal processing or preservation treatments may evoke bacterial coping mechanisms that alter gene expression, specifically and broadly, resulting in resistance to the bactericidal insults. Furthermore, environmentally cued changes in gene expression can lead to changes in bacterial adhesion, colonization, invasion, and toxin production that contribute to pathogen virulence. The shared microenvironment between the food preservation techniques and the host gastrointestinal tract drives microbes to adapt to the stressful environment, resulting in enhanced virulence and infectivity during a foodborne illness episode

Phylogeographic reconstruction of the marbled crayfish origin

The marbled crayfish (Procambarus virginalis) is a triploid and parthenogenetic freshwater crayfish species that has colonized diverse habitats around the world. Previous studies suggested that the clonal marbled crayfish population descended as recently as 25 years ago from a single specimen of P. fallax, the sexually reproducing parent species. However, the genetic, phylogeographic, and mechanistic origins of the species have remained enigmatic. We have now constructed a new genome assembly for P. virginalis to support a detailed phylogeographic analysis of the diploid parent species, Procambarus fallax. Our results strongly suggest that both parental haplotypes of P. virginalis were inherited from the Everglades subpopulation of P. fallax. Comprehensive whole-genome sequencing also detected triploid specimens in the same subpopulation, which either represent evolutionarily important intermediate genotypes or independent parthenogenetic lineages arising among the sexual parent population. Our findings thus clarify the geographic origin of the marbled crayfish and identify potential mechanisms of parthenogenetic speciation

Concert recording 2021-11-01

[Track 1]. Triathlon for solo horn. I. Aggressive / Paul Basler -- [Track 2]. Notturno, op. 112 / Carl Reinecke -- [Track 3]. Reflections on a Southern hymn. I. Intonation ; IV. Wondrous love / Stephen Gryc -- [Track 4]. Sunshine for horn, orchestra, and piano / Nathan Pereda -- [Track 5]. Fantasy for horn, op. 88 / Malcolm Arnold-- [Track 6]. Sonata for horn and piano / Margaret Brouwer -- [Track 7]. Tanguito / Dante Yenque -- [Track 8]. Sonata no. 3 for horn and piano / Alec Wilder -- [Track 9]. Aileron for eight horns / James Naigus -- [Track 10]. Six quartets. I. Adagio / Franz Schubert ; arranged by Verne Reynolds -- [Track 11]. Sunshine

Environmental factors influencing red knot (Calidris canutus islandica) departure times of relocation flights within the non-breeding period

Deciding when to depart on long-distance, sometimes global, movements can be especially important for flying species. Adverse weather conditions can affect energetic flight costs and navigational ability. While departure timings and conditions have been well-studied for migratory flights to and from the breeding range, few studies have focussed on flights within the non-breeding season. Yet in some cases, overwintering ranges can be large enough that ecological barriers, and a lack of resting sites en route, may resist movement, especially in unfavorable environmental conditions. Understanding the conditions that will enable or prohibit flights within an overwintering range is particularly relevant in light of climate change, whereby increases in extreme weather events may reduce the connectivity of sites. We tracked 495 (n = 251 in 2019; n = 244 in 2020) overwintering red knots (Calidris canutus islandica) in the Dutch Wadden Sea and investigated how many departed towards the UK (on westward relocation flights), which requires flying over the North Sea. For those that departed, we used a resource selection model to determine the effect of environmental conditions on the timing of relocation flights. Specifically, we investigated the effects of wind, rain, atmospheric pressure, cloud cover, and migratory timing relative to sunset and tidal cycle, which have all been shown to be crucial to migratory departure conditions. Approximately 37% (2019) and 36% (2020) of tagged red knots departed on westward relocation flights, indicating differences between individuals' space use within the overwintering range. Red knots selected for departures between 1 and 2.5 h after sunset, approximately 4 h before high tide, with tailwinds and little cloud cover. However, rainfall and changes in atmospheric pressure appear unimportant. Our study reveals environmental conditions that are important for relocation flights across an ecological barrier, indicating potential consequences of climate change on connectivity

Combinatorial CRISPR-Cas9 screens for de novo mapping of genetic interactions.

We developed a systematic approach to map human genetic networks by combinatorial CRISPR-Cas9 perturbations coupled to robust analysis of growth kinetics. We targeted all pairs of 73 cancer genes with dual guide RNAs in three cell lines, comprising 141,912 tests of interaction. Numerous therapeutically relevant interactions were identified, and these patterns replicated with combinatorial drugs at 75% precision. From these results, we anticipate that cellular context will be critical to synthetic-lethal therapies

Compton Scattering Cross Section on the Proton at High Momentum Transfer

Cross-section values for Compton scattering on the proton were measured at 25 kinematic settings over the range s = 5-11 and -t = 2-7 GeV2 with statistical accuracy of a few percent. The scaling power for the s-dependence of the cross section at fixed center of mass angle was found to be 8.0 +/ 0.2, strongly inconsistent with the prediction of perturbative QCD. The observed cross-section values are in fair agreement with the calculations using the handbag mechanism, in which the external photons couple to a single quark.Comment: 5 pages, 5 figure

Atlas of Transcription Factor Binding Sites from ENCODE DNase Hypersensitivity Data across 27 Tissue Types.

Characterizing the tissue-specific binding sites of transcription factors (TFs) is essential to reconstruct gene regulatory networks and predict functions for non-coding genetic variation. DNase-seq footprinting enables the prediction of genome-wide binding sites for hundreds of TFs simultaneously. Despite the public availability of high-quality DNase-seq data from hundreds of samples, a comprehensive, up-to-date resource for the locations of genomic footprints is lacking. Here, we develop a scalable footprinting workflow using two state-of-the-art algorithms: Wellington and HINT. We apply our workflow to detect footprints in 192 ENCODE DNase-seq experiments and predict the genomic occupancy of 1,515 human TFs in 27 human tissues. We validate that these footprints overlap true-positive TF binding sites from ChIP-seq. We demonstrate that the locations, depth, and tissue specificity of footprints predict effects of genetic variants on gene expression and capture a substantial proportion of genetic risk for complex traits