Responses of chemical composition, amino acid and fatty acid profiles of breast muscle to dietary crude fibre levels in China Micro-Ducks

The effects of dietary crude fibre (CF) levels on the chemical composition, amino acid (AA) and fatty acid (FA) profiles of breast muscle in male China Micro-ducks (21 - 56 d) were investigated in this study. The birds were randomly allocated to four treatments, of which dietary CF levels were 16.7, 42.6, 77.9 and 101.6 g/kg of dry matter (DM), respectively. No influences on the proportions of crude ash, crude protein, lysine, methionine, threonine, phenylalanine, histidine, arginine, aspartic acid, glutamic acid, glycine, alanine, serine, cysteine, tyrosine, proline, C12:0, C18:0, C18:1n9, C20:0 and C22:1n9 in muscle were observed across the treatments. Consequently, the concentrations of semi-essential AA, non-essential AA, total AA, aromatic AA and delicious AA in muscle, along with the Δ-9-desaturase (18) index, were not affected by the treatments. Significant lower concentrations of valine, leucine, isoleucine, essential AA, branched-chain AA, C16:1n7 and monounsaturated FA in muscle, along with a lower ratio of branched-chain to aromatic AA, were noted in a dietary treatment with a CF level of 16.7 g/kg DM compared to other dietary treatments. The rise of the dietary CF level significantly increased the proportions of DM, ether extract, gross energy, C18:2n6, C18:3n3, C20:4n6, unsaturated FA, total FA, polyunsaturated FA, n-3 polyunsaturated FA, n-6 polyunsaturated FA, essential FA, and the Δ-9-desaturase (16) index. Furthermore, the rise of the dietary CF level increased the ratios of unsaturated to saturated FA, polyunsaturated to saturated FA, and n-6 to n-3 polyunsaturated FA in muscle. However, it decreased the atherogenic index and the proportions of C14:0, C16:0, and saturated FA significantly. In conclusion, depending largely on dietary levels, CF profoundly and positively influenced the nutritional quality of breast muscle, especially the FA profile.Keywords: China Micro-duck, dietary fibre, fatty acid, nutritional quality of meat, fatty aci

Network Cournot Competition

Cournot competition is a fundamental economic model that represents firms competing in a single market of a homogeneous good. Each firm tries to maximize its utility---a function of the production cost as well as market price of the product---by deciding on the amount of production. In today's dynamic and diverse economy, many firms often compete in more than one market simultaneously, i.e., each market might be shared among a subset of these firms. In this situation, a bipartite graph models the access restriction where firms are on one side, markets are on the other side, and edges demonstrate whether a firm has access to a market or not. We call this game \emph{Network Cournot Competition} (NCC). In this paper, we propose algorithms for finding pure Nash equilibria of NCC games in different situations. First, we carefully design a potential function for NCC, when the price functions for markets are linear functions of the production in that market. However, for nonlinear price functions, this approach is not feasible. We model the problem as a nonlinear complementarity problem in this case, and design a polynomial-time algorithm that finds an equilibrium of the game for strongly convex cost functions and strongly monotone revenue functions. We also explore the class of price functions that ensures strong monotonicity of the revenue function, and show it consists of a broad class of functions. Moreover, we discuss the uniqueness of equilibria in both of these cases which means our algorithms find the unique equilibria of the games. Last but not least, when the cost of production in one market is independent from the cost of production in other markets for all firms, the problem can be separated into several independent classical \emph{Cournot Oligopoly} problems. We give the first combinatorial algorithm for this widely studied problem

Comments on gluon scattering amplitudes via AdS/CFT

In this article we consider n gluon color ordered, planar amplitudes in N=4 super Yang Mills at strong 't Hooft coupling. These amplitudes are approximated by classical surfaces in AdS_5 space. We compute the value of the amplitude for a particular kinematic configuration for a large number of gluons and find that the result disagrees with a recent guess for the exact value of the amplitude. Our results are still compatible with a possible relation between amplitudes and Wilson loops. In addition, we also give a prescription for computing processes involving local operators and asymptotic states with a fixed number of gluons. As a byproduct, we also obtain a string theory prescription for computing the dual of the ordinary Wilson loop, Tr P exp[ i\oint A ], with no couplings to the scalars. We also evaluate the quark-antiquark potential at two loops.Comment: 27 pages, 9 figures,v3:minor correction

Effects of Allelic Variation in Glutenin Subunits and Gliadins on Baking-Quality in Near-isogenic Lines of Common Wheat cv. Longmai 19

Two lines, L-19-613 and L-19-626, were produced from the common wheat cultivar Longmai 19 (L-19) by six consecutive backcrosses using biochemical marker-assisted selection. L-19 (Glu-D1a, Glu-A3c/Gli-A1?; Gli-A1? is a gene coding for unnamed gliadin) and L-19-613 (Glu-D1d, Glu-A3c/Gli-A1?) formed a set of near-isogenic lines (NILs) for HMW-GS, while L-19-613 and L-19-626 (Glu-D1d, Glu-A3e/Gli-A1m) constituted another set of NILs for the LMW-GS/gliadins. The three L-19 NILs were grown in the wheat breeding nursery in 2007 and 2008. The field experiments were designed using the three-column contrast arrangement method with four replicates. The three lines were ranked as follows for measurements of gluten strength, which was determined by the gluten index, Zeleny sedimentation, the stability and breakdown time of the farinogram, the maximum resistance and area of the extensogram, and the P andWvalues of the alveogram: L-19-613 > L-19-626 > L-19. The parameters listed above were significantly different between lines at the 0.05 or 0.01 level. The Glu-D1 and Glu-A3/Gli-A1 loci had additive effects on the gluten index, Zeleny sedimentation, stability, breakdown time, maximum resistance, area, P and W values. Although genetic variation at the Glu-A3/Gli-A1 locus had a great influence on wheat quality, the genetic difference between Glu-D1d and Glu-D1a at the Glu-D1 locus was much larger than that of Glu-A3c/Gli-A1? and Glu-A3e/Gli-A1m at the Glu-A3/Gli-A1 locus. Glu-D1d had negative effects on the extensibility and the L value compared with Glu-D1a. In contrast, Glu-A3c/Gli-A1? had a positive effect on these traits compared with Glu-A3e/Gli-A1m

Semileptonic decays of Bs1B_{s1}, Bs2∗B_{s2}^*, Bs0B_{s0} and Bs1′B_{s1}'

Stimulated by recent observations of the excited bottom-strange mesons $B_{s1}$ and $B_{s2}^*$, we calculate the semileptonic decays $B_{s0}, B_{s1}^{\prime}, B_{s1}, B_{s2}^*\to [D_s(1968), D_{s}^*(2112), D_{sJ}(2317), D_{sJ}(2460)]\ell\bar{\nu}$, which is relevant for the exploration of the potential of searching these semileptonic decays in experiment.Comment: 11 pages, 3 figures, 9 tables. More discussion added, some descriptions changed. The version to appear in EPJ

Modeling quark-hadron duality for relativistic, confined fermions

We discuss a model for the study of quark-hadron duality in inclusive electron scattering based on solving the Dirac equation numerically for a scalar confining linear potential and a vector color Coulomb potential. We qualitatively reproduce the features of quark-hadron duality for all potentials considered, and discuss similarities and differences to previous models that simplified the situation by treating either the quarks or all particles as scalars. We discuss the scaling results for PWIA and FSI, and the approach to scaling using the analog of the Callan-Gross relation for y-scaling.Comment: 38 pages, 21 figure

Solving variational inequalities defined on a domain with infinitely many linear constraints

We study a variational inequality problem whose domain is defined by infinitely many linear inequalities. A discretization method and an analytic center based inexact cutting plane method are proposed. Under proper assumptions, the convergence results for both methods are given. We also provide numerical examples to illustrate the proposed method

Self-Assembled Local Artificial Substrates of GaAs on Si Substrate

We propose a self-assembling procedure for the fabrication of GaAs islands by Droplet Epitaxy on silicon substrate. Controlling substrate temperature and amount of supplied gallium is possible to tune the base size of the islands from 70 up to 250 nm and the density from 107 to 109 cm−2. The islands show a standard deviation of base size distribution below 10% and their shape evolves changing the aspect ratio from 0.3 to 0.5 as size increases. Due to their characteristics, these islands are suitable to be used as local artificial substrates for the integration of III–V quantum nanostructures directly on silicon substrate

Direct Measurements of the Branching Fractions for D0→K−e+νeD^0 \to K^-e^+\nu_e and D0→π−e+νeD^0 \to \pi^-e^+\nu_e and Determinations of the Form Factors f+K(0)f_{+}^{K}(0) and f+π(0)f^{\pi}_{+}(0)

The absolute branching fractions for the decays $D^0 \to K^-e ^+\nu_e$ and $D^0 \to \pi^-e^+\nu_e$ are determined using $7584\pm 198 \pm 341$ singly tagged $\bar D^0$ sample from the data collected around 3.773 GeV with the BES-II detector at the BEPC. In the system recoiling against the singly tagged $\bar D^0$ meson, $104.0\pm 10.9$ events for $D^0 \to K^-e ^+\nu_e$ and $9.0 \pm 3.6$ events for $D^0 \to \pi^-e^+\nu_e$ decays are observed. Those yield the absolute branching fractions to be $BF(D^0 \to K^-e^+\nu_e)=(3.82 \pm 0.40\pm 0.27)$ and $BF(D^0 \to \pi^-e^+\nu_e)=(0.33 \pm 0.13\pm 0.03)$. The vector form factors are determined to be $|f^K_+(0)| = 0.78 \pm 0.04 \pm 0.03$ and $|f^{\pi}_+(0)| = 0.73 \pm 0.14 \pm 0.06$. The ratio of the two form factors is measured to be $|f^{\pi}_+(0)/f^K_+(0)|= 0.93 \pm 0.19 \pm 0.07$.Comment: 6 pages, 5 figure