Oral supplementation of medium-chain fatty acids during the dry period supports the neutrophil viability of peripartum dairy cows

A randomised clinical trial was conducted to explore the effect of orally supplemented medium-chain fatty acids (MCFA) to heifers and cows starting 6-8 weeks prior to expected calving date on blood and milk polymorphonuclear neutrophilic leucocyte (PMNL) apoptosis between 1 and 3 d in milk (DIM). The effects of MCFA-supplementation on the likelihood of intramammary infections (IMI) in early lactation, and test-day somatic cell count (SCC) and average daily milk yield (MY) during the first 4 months of lactation were evaluated as well. Twenty-two animals were included of which half were orally supplemented with MCFA starting 6-8 weeks prior to calving and half served as non-supplemented controls. The PMNL viability in both blood and milk was quantified using dual-colour flow cytometry with fluorescein-labelled annexin and propidium iodide. In non-supplemented animals, % blood PMNL apoptosis significantly increased between start of supplementation and early lactation, reflecting a potential reduction in innate immune capacity, whereas this was not true in the MCFA-supplemented animals. Similar results were seen in milk PMNL apoptosis. Overall, the % apoptotic milk PMNL between 1 and 3 DIM was significantly lower in the MCFA-supplemented group compared with the non-supplemented group. There was no substantial effect of oral MCFA-supplementation on the likelihood of quarter IMI nor on the composite test-day milk SCC or average daily MY. In conclusion, oral MCFA-supplementation starting 6-8 weeks before expected calving date supported the blood and milk neutrophil viability in early lactating dairy cows. Still, this was not reflected in an improvement of udder health nor MY in early and later lactation. The results should trigger research to further unravel the mechanisms behind the observed immunomodulating effect, and the potential relevance for the cows' performances throughout lactation

Estimating Information Value in Collaborative Multi-Agent Planning Systems

This paper addresses the problem of identifying the value of information held by a teammate on a distributed, multi-agent team. It focuses on a distributed scheduling task in which computer agents support people who are carrying out complex tasks in a dynamic environment. The paper presents a decision-theoretic algorithm for determining the value of information that is potentially relevant to schedule revisions, but is directly available only to the person and not the computer agent. The design of a "coordination autonomy" (CA) module within a coordination-manager system provided the empirical setting for this work. By design, the CA module depends on an external scheduler module to determine the specific effect of additional information on overall system performance. The paper describes two methods for reducing the number of queries the CA issues to the scheduler, enabling it to satisfy computational resource constraints placed on it. Experimental results indicate the algorithm improves system performance and establish the exceptional efficiency---measured in terms of the number of queries required for estimating the value of information---that can be achieved by the query-reducing methods.Engineering and Applied Science