Evaluation of cross-protection afforded by a Salmonella Choleraesuis vaccine against Salmonella infections in pigs under field conditions

This field study investigated the efficacy of a Salmonella Choleraesuis live vaccine (Argus SC™) to reduce the number of infections with Salmonella. Twelve groups of about 380 pigs each were randomly allocated to either vaccination (V) or no vaccination (C). The vaccine was applied orally at 3 and 16 weeks. Forty pigs per group were blood sampled at 3, 10, 16 and 24 weeks to detect possible antibodies against Salmonella. The prevalence of Salmonella in the lymph nodes as the major variable. In the V groups, only 0.6 % of the lymph nodes was positive, whereas 7.2 % was positive in the C groups (p \u3c 0.001). The percentage of seropositive pigs at 24 weeks (cut-off OD \u3e 10) was 26 % and 9 % in the V and C groups, respectively (p \u3c 0.00 I). The present study documented that vaccination with a live modified S. Choleraesuis vaccine is a useful tool to lower the prevalence of Salmonella in swine herds

Automatic recognition of schwa variants in spontaneous Hungarian speech

This paper analyzes the nature of the process involved in optional vowel reduction in Hungarian, and the acoustic structure of schwa variants in spontaneous speech. The study focuses on the acoustic patterns of both the basic realizations of Hungarian vowels and their realizations as neutral vowels (schwas), as well as on the design, implementation, and evaluation of a set of algorithms for the recognition of both types of realizations from the speech waveform. The authors address the question whether schwas form a unified group of vowels or they show some dependence on the originally intended articulation of the vowel they stand for. The acoustic study uses a database consisting of over 4,000 utterances extracted from continuous speech, and recorded from 19 speakers. The authors propose methods for the recognition of neutral vowels depending on the various vowels they replace in spontaneous speech. Mel-Frequency Cepstral Coefficients are calculated and used for the training of Hidden Markov Models. The recognition system was trained on 2,500 utterances and then tested on 1,500 utterances. The results show that a neutral vowel can be detected in 72% of all occurrences. Stressed and unstressed syllables can be distinguished in 92% of all cases. Neutralized vowels do not form a unified group of phoneme realizations. The pronunciation of schwa heavily depends on the original articulation configuration of the intended vowel

Exploiting Prosody for Automatic Syntactic Phrase Boundary Detection in Speech

The relation between syntax and prosody is evident, even if the prosodic structure cannot be directly mapped to the syntactic one and vice versa. Syntax-to-prosody mapping is widely used in text-to-speech applications, but prosody-to-syntax mapping is mostly missing from automatic speech recognition/understanding systems. This paper presents an experiment towards filling this gap and evaluating whether a HMM-based automatic prosodic segmentation tool can be used to support the reconstruction of the syntactic structure directly from speech. Results show that up to 85% of syntactic clause boundaries and up to about 70% of embedded syntactic phrase boundaries could be identified based on the detection of phonological phrases. Recall rates do not depend further on syntactic layering, in other words, whether the phrase is multiply embedded or not. Clause boundaries can be well assigned to intonational phrase level in read speech and can be well separated from lower level syntactic phrases based on the type of the aligned phonological phrase(s). These findings can be exploited in speech understanding systems, allowing for the recovery of the skeleton of the syntactic structure, based purely on the speech signal

Direct AKAP-mediated protein-protein interactions as potential drug targets

A-kinase-anchoring proteins (AKAPs) are a diverse family of about 50 scaffolding proteins. They are defined by the presence of a structurally conserved protein kinase A (PKA)-binding domain. AKAPs tether PKA and other signalling proteins such as further protein kinases, protein phosphatases and phosphodiesterases by direct protein-protein interactions to cellular compartments. Thus, AKAPs form the basis of signalling modules that integrate cellular signalling processes and limit these to defined sites. Disruption of AKAP functions by gene targeting, knockdown approaches and, in particular, pharmacological disruption of defined AKAP-dependent protein-protein interactions has revealed key roles of AKAPs in numerous processes, including the regulation of cardiac myocyte contractility and vasopressin-mediated water reabsorption in the kidney. Dysregulation of such processes causes diseases, including cardiovascular and renal disorders. In this review, we discuss AKAP functions elucidated by gene targeting and knockdown approaches, but mainly focus on studies utilizing peptides for disruption of direct AKAP-mediated protein-protein interactions. The latter studies point to direct AKAP-mediated protein-protein interactions as targets for novel drugs