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Probiotics are one of the management tools to improve the host's healthy microbiota. The positive effects of probiotics on host health are speciesspecific, so probiotics isolated from host's own gut may be most beneficial. Many of the metabolites (e.g., short-chain fatty acids, bacteriocins, and hydrogen peroxide) produced by Lactobacillus johnsonii have specific inhibitory profiles against invading pathogens. In this study, we isolated L. johnsonii GJ231 from the intestinal tract of healthy female beagles. The genome size of 1.763 M encoded a total of 1,691 predicted genes. Many carbohydrate-active enzymes responsible for carbohydrate degradation and the production of short-chain fatty acids were also predicted. The metabolic profile of short-chain fatty acids in L. johnsonii GJ231 was determined using LC-MS/MS. The bacteriocinproducing gene bacteriocin (lactacin F) in L. johnsonii GJ231 was also predicted. In vitro, experiments demonstrated that GJ231 can thrive in weak acids, 0.3% bile salts, and artificial gastrointestinal fluid models. It was tolerant of to high temperatures up to 70℃, was non-hemolytic, inhibited pathogenic bacteria, and had a high antioxidant capacity. In vivo safety experiments conducted in mice revealed that oral administration of GJ231 not only had no toxic side effect but also increased their antioxidant capacity. In conclusion, combining the above test results, which collectively demonstrate that canine-derived L. johnsonii GJ231 was a non-pathogenic, acid-tolerant and bile-salt-tolerant probiotic strain that inhibits pathogenic bacteria and improves host antioxidant function. This may make it a promising candidate for the development of innovative functional foods for pets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Aging dogs serve as a valuable preclinical model for Alzheimer's disease (AD) due to their natural age-related development of β-amyloid (Aβ) plaques, human-like metabolism, and large brains that are ideal for studying structural brain aging trajectories from serial neuroimaging. Here we examined the effects of chronic treatment with the calcineurin inhibitor (CNI) tacrolimus or the nuclear factor of activated T cells (NFAT)-inhibiting compound Q134R on age-related canine brain atrophy from a longitudinal study in middle-aged beagles (36 females, 7 males) undergoing behavioral enrichment. Annual MRI was analyzed using modern, automated techniques for region-of-interest-based and voxel-based volumetric assessments. We found that the frontal lobe showed accelerated atrophy with age, while the caudate nucleus remained relatively stable. Remarkably, the hippocampus increased in volume in all dogs. None of these changes were influenced by tacrolimus or Q134R treatment. Our results suggest that behavioral enrichment can prevent atrophy and increase the volume of the hippocampus but does not prevent aging-associated prefrontal cortex atrophy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is growing interest in the potential health benefits of probiotics for both humans and animals. The study aimed to investigate the effects of feeding the canine-derived probiotic Pediococcus acidilactici GLP06 to adult beagles by analysing the microbiome and metabolome. Twenty-four healthy adult beagles were randomly assigned to four groups. The CK group received a standard diet, while the three probiotic groups, the LG group (2 × 108 CFU/day/dog), MG group (2 × 109 CFU/day/dog), and HG group (2 × 1010 CFU/day/dog), received the standard diet supplemented with varying amounts of probiotics. The results show that, compared to the CK group, total antioxidant capacity was significantly increased in the MG and HG groups (p < 0.05), and superoxide dismutase and catalase were significantly increased in the HG group (p < 0.05). Compared to the CK group, malondialdehyde and blood urea nitrogen content were significantly decreased in the MG and HG groups (p < 0.05). Additionally, secretory immunoglobulin A activity was significantly increased in the HG group compared to the CK and LG groups (p < 0.05), and immunoglobulin G activity was significantly increased in the HG group compared to the CK, LG, and MG groups (p < 0.05). In addition, compared with the CK group, the abundance of Faecalitalea and Collinsella increased in the LG group, and the relative abundance of Tyzzerella and Parasutterella increased in the MG group. The a diversity and the relative abundances of beneficial bacteria (Faecalibacterium, Lachnospiraceae_NK4A1316, and Ruminococcaceae_UCG-005) were higher in the HG group than in the CK group. Furthermore, acetic acid content was significantly increased in the HG group compared to the CK, LG, and MG groups (p < 0.05). Butyric acid, isobutyric acid, and the total SCFA content were significantly increased in the HG group compared to the CK group (p < 0.05). Moreover, metabolome analysis revealed 111 upregulated and 171 downregulated metabolites in the HG group. In conclusion, this study presents evidence that supplementing with P. acidilactici GLP06 can have a positive impact on antioxidant activity, immunoproteins, SCFAs, and gut microbiota in adult beagles. These findings highlight the potential of probiotics as a dietary intervention to enhance gut health and overall wellbeing in companion animals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This report presents the first case of nodular dermatofibrosis with renal cysts (NDRC) in a beagle. In this atypical case, the gene mutation associated with the disease was not present, the renal cysts showed dynamic changes in size and number, and the patient has greatly surpassed the NDRC life expectation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Phylogenies are central to many research areas in biology and commonly estimated using likelihood-based methods. Unfortunately, any likelihood-based method, including Bayesian inference, can be restrictively slow for large datasets—with many taxa and/or many sites in the sequence alignment—or complex substitutions models. The primary limiting factor when using large datasets and/or complex models in probabilistic phylogenetic analyses is the likelihood calculation, which dominates the total computation time. To address this bottleneck, we incorporated the high-performance phylogenetic library BEAGLE into RevBayes , which enables multi-threading on multi-core CPUs and GPUs, as well as hardware specific vectorized instructions for faster likelihood calculations. Our new implementation of RevBayes+BEAGLE retains the flexibility and dynamic nature that users expect from vanilla RevBayes. In addition, we implemented native parallelization within RevBayes without an external library using the message passing interface (MPI); RevBayes+MPI. We evaluated our new implementation of RevBayes+BEAGLE using multi-threading on CPUs and 2 different powerful GPUs (NVidia Titan V and NVIDIA A100) against our native implementation of RevBayes+MPI. We found good improvements in speedup when multiple cores were used, with up to 20-fold speedup when using multiple CPU cores and over 90-fold speedup when using multiple GPU cores. The improvement depended on the data type used, DNA or amino acids, and the size of the alignment, but less on the size of the tree. We additionally investigated the cost of rescaling partial likelihoods to avoid numerical underflow and showed that unnecessarily frequent and inefficient rescaling can increase runtimes up to 4-fold. Finally, we presented and compared a new approach to store partial likelihoods on branches instead of nodes that can speed up computations up to 1.7 times but comes at twice the memory requirements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract This report presents the first case of nodular dermatofibrosis with renal cysts (NDRC) in a beagle. In this atypical case, the gene mutation associated with the disease was not present, the renal cysts showed dynamic changes in size and number, and the patient has greatly surpassed the NDRC life expectation.

Probiotics are one of the management tools to improve the host's healthy microbiota. The positive effects of probiotics on host health are species-specific, so probiotics isolated from host's own gut may be most beneficial. Many of the metabolites (e.g., short-chain fatty acids, bacteriocins, and hydrogen peroxide) produced by Lactobacillus johnsonii have specific inhibitory profiles against invading pathogens. In this study, we isolated L. johnsonii GJ231 from the intestinal tract of healthy female beagles. The genome size of 1.763 M encoded a total of 1,691 predicted genes. Many carbohydrate-active enzymes responsible for carbohydrate degradation and the production of short-chain fatty acids were also predicted. The metabolic profile of short-chain fatty acids in L. johnsonii GJ231 was determined using LC-MS/MS. The bacteriocin-producing gene bacteriocin (lactacin F) in L. johnsonii GJ231 was also predicted. In vitro , experiments demonstrated that GJ231 can thrive in weak acids, 0.3% bile salts, and artificial gastrointestinal fluid models. It was tolerant of to high temperatures up to 70°C, was non- hemolytic, inhibited pathogenic bacteria, and had a high antioxidant capacity. In vivo safety experiments conducted in mice revealed that oral administration of GJ231 not only had no toxic side effect but also increased their antioxidant capacity. In conclusion, combining the above test results, which collectively demonstrate that canine-derived L. johnsonii GJ231 was a non-pathogenic, acid-tolerant and bile-salt-tolerant probiotic strain that inhibits pathogenic bacteria and improves host antioxidant function. This may make it a promising candidate for the development of innovative functional foods for pets., Competing Interests: The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest., (Copyright © 2024 Zhao, Li, Zhang and Li.)

There is growing interest in the potential health benefits of probiotics for both humans and animals. The study aimed to investigate the effects of feeding the canine-derived probiotic Pediococcus acidilactici GLP06 to adult beagles by analysing the microbiome and metabolome. Twenty-four healthy adult beagles were randomly assigned to four groups. The CK group received a standard diet, while the three probiotic groups, the LG group (2 × 10 8  CFU/day/dog), MG group (2 × 10 9  CFU/day/dog), and HG group (2 × 10 10  CFU/day/dog), received the standard diet supplemented with varying amounts of probiotics. The results show that, compared to the CK group, total antioxidant capacity was significantly increased in the MG and HG groups ( p  < 0.05), and superoxide dismutase and catalase were significantly increased in the HG group ( p  < 0.05). Compared to the CK group, malondialdehyde and blood urea nitrogen content were significantly decreased in the MG and HG groups ( p  < 0.05). Additionally, secretory immunoglobulin A activity was significantly increased in the HG group compared to the CK and LG groups ( p  < 0.05), and immunoglobulin G activity was significantly increased in the HG group compared to the CK, LG, and MG groups ( p  < 0.05). In addition, compared with the CK group, the abundance of Faecalitalea and Collinsella increased in the LG group, and the relative abundance of Tyzzerella and Parasutterella increased in the MG group. The α diversity and the relative abundances of beneficial bacteria ( Faecalibacterium , Lachnospiraceae&#95;NK4A1316 , and Ruminococcaceae&#95;UCG-005 ) were higher in the HG group than in the CK group. Furthermore, acetic acid content was significantly increased in the HG group compared to the CK, LG, and MG groups ( p  < 0.05). Butyric acid, isobutyric acid, and the total SCFA content were significantly increased in the HG group compared to the CK group ( p  < 0.05). Moreover, metabolome analysis revealed 111 upregulated and 171 downregulated metabolites in the HG group. In conclusion, this study presents evidence that supplementing with P. acidilactici GLP06 can have a positive impact on antioxidant activity, immunoproteins, SCFAs, and gut microbiota in adult beagles. These findings highlight the potential of probiotics as a dietary intervention to enhance gut health and overall wellbeing in companion animals., Competing Interests: The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest., (Copyright © 2024 Zhao, Zhang, Li, Liu, Bao and Li.)