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Microencapsulation is an advanced technique used to improve the viability of probiotics and minimize sensitivity during processing, storage, and in the gastrointestinal environment. Two dietary treatments including a control and an encapsulated probiotic, Bacillus subtilis E20 (EP), were used to evaluate the efficacy in improving the intestinal microbiome of white shrimp, Penaeus vannamei, after a 60-feeding trial. The 16S rDNA next-generation sequencing (NGS) analysis indicated that shrimp fed the EP diet generated higher amplicon reads than shrimp fed the control diet. No significant differences were observed in the α-diversity index of the intestinal microbiota of shrimp that were fed the control and EP diet. At the phylum level, Proteobacteria was relatively abundant in the microbiota of shrimp fed both the control and EP diet. The treatment with EP increased the expression of Tenericutes, Bacteroidetes, and Firmicutes, more than the control. The PC analysis revealed that the EP diet altered the bacterial profile in shrimp’s intestines into forming different clusters. Unique genera such as Luteolibacter, Simkaniaceae, Haemophilus, Pirellulaceae, Filomicrobium, Sphingomonas, and Erysipelotrichaceae UCG-003 along with well-known probiotic genera Bacillus and Lactobacillus were found in the intestine of shrimp fed the EP diet. The PCA eigenvector plots indicated a higher abundance of Bacillus in shrimp fed with EP diet, but a higher abundance of Vibrio in shrimp fed with control diet. These results suggest that encapsulated B. subtilis E20 can be beneficial to shrimp microbiota.

Panax notoginseng (Burk) F. H. Chen is a traditional Chinese herbal medicine commonly used in clinical applications. This study examined the effects of the Panax notoginseng water extract (PNWE) on the immune responses and digestive enzyme activity of Litopenaeus vannamei (L. vannamei). The PNWE (50, 100, and 200 μg (g shrimp)−1) was injected into L. vannamei to analyze the immune response parameters, including the total haemocyte count (THC), granular haemocytes (GC), semi-granular haemocytes (SGC), hialin haemocyte (HC), the respiratory burst (RB), the phagocytic ratio (PR), the phagocytic index (PI), and phenoloxidase (PO). We evaluated the activity of the intestinal digestive enzymes (trypsin, chymotrypsin, amylase, and lipase), the histopathology, and the intestine Vibrio numbers. The results showed that different concentrations of the PNWE significantly increased THC, GC, SGC, PO and RB activity, the PR, and the PI of L. vannamei while reducing the HC. In addition, the PNWE also significantly increased the chymotrypsin, trypsin, and amylase activity of L. vannamei. Furthermore, 50 µg (g shrimp)−1 of PNWE regulated the lipase activity. Additionally, different concentrations of the PNWE significantly reduced the Vibrio numbers in the intestine without damaging the hepatopancreas and intestine tissues. These results indicate that the PNWE improves the immune responses of L. vannamei by increasing the haemocyte count and regulating intestinal digestive enzymes.

Prebiotics acting as immunosaccharides exhibit immunomodulatory functions to improve the immune defense of the host against infectious diseases. The purpose of the present study was to investigate the effects of dietary chitooligosaccharide (COS) supplementation on the growth, innate immunity and disease resistance of Nile tilapia (Oreochromis niloticus) fed a diet containing 0.4%, 0.8% and 1.2% COSs for 8 weeks. The results showed significant increases in weight gain (WG), feed efficiency (FE) and specific growth rate (SGR) in COS-supplemented fish compared to fish in the control group. The fish exhibited a significant decrease in cumulative mortality in fish fed 0.8% and 1.2% COS when challenged with Streptococcus iniae. The immune parameters, including phagocytotic activity (PA), respiratory burst (RB) activity, and superoxide dismutase (SOD) activities of the head kidney and serum lysozyme, as well as the expression of TNF-α, IL-1β and IL-8, were revealed in 0.8% and 1.2% COS-supplemented fish. These results demonstrated that COS could be used as a prebiotic and that dietary supplementation with 0.8% COS could improve growth performance and innate immunity against pathogen infections in Nile tilapia.

An experiment was conducted to evaluate the effects of the Micro-Aid Liquid 10 (MAL10) (DPI Global, Porterville, CA, USA), a product made from yucca extract, on growth performance, gut microbiota, and resistance of white shrimp, Litopenaeus vannamei against infectious disease caused by Vibrio alginolyticus. MAL10 was added to shrimp rearing water at different levels of 0 (control), 0.25 mL m3−1 (W0.25), 0.5 mL m3−1 (W0.5), 1 mL m3−1 (W1), and 5 mL m3−1 (W5), respectively, once per week for 70 days. Growth performances, including final body weight, specific growth rate, average daily growth and percentage of weight gain, were significantly improved by adding the MAL10 at levels up to 5 mL m3−1, which may be due to the proliferation of B cells in hepatopancreas of MAL10-treated shrimp. No significant differences in the total viable count and Vibrio-like count in the gut of shrimp were recorded by spread plate method. In the challenge test, shrimp reared in the water supplemented with MAL10 at levels of 1–5 mL m3−1 had significantly lower cumulative mortality after a challenge test with V. alginolyticus compared to shrimp reared in the control, W0.25 and W0.5 groups. Next-generation sequencing indicated that the relative distribution of phylum Proteobacteria in control (80.4%) was higher than the W (77.4%). The proportion of Vibrio was primarily dominant genera in the shrimp intestine and highest in the control group compared to the W group, followed by Spongiimonas, Motilimonas, Demequina, and Shewanella genera. Although there was no statistically significant difference, higher α-diversity indices were recorded in the W5-treated group than in the control group. Therefore, it is considered that MAL10 could be used as a natural alternative in shrimp aquaculture to reduce the risk of infectious disease caused by pathogenic Vibrio and improve the growth performance of white shrimp.

Fungal delignification can be a feasible process to pretreat biomass for bioethanol production if its performance is improved in terms of efficiency through a few modifications. The aim of this study was to enhance the biodelignification pretreatment of rice straw using laccase in the presence of ionic liquid (1-Allyl-3-methylimidazolium chloride, [AMIM]Cl) or surfactant (TritonX-100). Addition of 750 mg/L [AMIM]Cl and 500 mg/L TritonX-100 increases the lignin removal to 18.49% and 31.79%, which is higher than that of laccase only (11.97%). The enzymatic saccharification process was carried out based on different strategies. The highest cellulose conversion, 40.96%, 38.24%, and 37.91%, was obtained after 72 h of enzymatic saccharification when the substrate was washed with distilled water after pretreatment of rice straw with laccase + TritonX-100, laccase + [AMIM]Cl, and laccase only, respectively. In addition, the morphology and structure changes of pretreated and untreated rice straw were studied. Both surface area and cellulose crystallinity are substantially altered after laccase + [AMIM]Cl and laccase + TritonX-100 pretreatment. Enhanced saccharification efficiency of rice straw was achieved by laccase pretreatment with ionic liquid or surfactant in a single system.

In this work, an analytical framework for deriving the exact moments of multiple-input- multiple-output (MIMO) mutual information in the high-signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) regime is proposed. The idea is to make efficient use of the matrix-variate densities of channel matrices instead of the eigenvalue densities as in the literature. The framework is applied to the study of the emerging models of MIMO Rayleigh product channels and Jacobi MIMO channels, which include several well-known channels models as special cases. The corresponding exact moments of any order for the high-SNR mutual information are derived. The explicit moment expressions are utilized to construct simple yet accurate approximations to the outage probability. Despite the high-SNR nature, simulation shows usefulness of the approximations with finite SNR values in the scenario of low outage probability relevant to MIMO communications.

An equipment status management and maintenance platform of an intelligent substation monitoring and control system is built in the Tai-Tam substation of the Taipower company. The real-time operating status of the equipment, such as the server, supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) human−machine interface (HMI) software, switches, intelligent electronic devices (IEDs), merging units (MUs), as well as the entire SCADA system, are evaluated comprehensively. First, the status information of all equipment is collected, and the theory of relative deterioration degree (RDD) and fuzzy theory (FT) are applied to calculate the fuzzy evaluation matrix of the equipment influencing factors. Then, the subjective analytic hierarchy process (AHP) and the objective entropy method for weighting are combined to calculate the comprehensive weights of the equipment influencing factors. Finally, the result of the equipment status evaluation is obtained using the fuzzy comprehensive evaluation (FCE) method and is presented at the equipment status management and maintenance platform. Such equipment status evaluation results can be used by the inspection and maintenance personnel to determine the priority for equipment maintenance and repair. The result of this study may serve as a valuable reference to utility companies when making maintenance plans.

Distributed energy resources (DERs) are being widely interconnected to electrical power grids. The dispersed and intermittent generational mixes bring technical and economic challenges to the power systems in terms of stability, reliability, and interoperability. In practice, most of the communication technologies in DER are provided by proprietary communication protocols, which are not designed for the prevention of cyber security over a wide area network, and methodology of DER integration is not unified. This has made it technically difficult for power utilities and aggregators to monitor and control the DER systems after they are interconnected with the electrical grids. Moreover, peer to peer communication between DER systems as well as local intelligent computation is required to reduce decision latency and enhance the stability of the smart grid or microgrid. In this paper, the first, novel architecture of IEC 61850 XMPP (extensible messaging and presence protocol) of the edge computing gateway, involving advanced concepts and technologies, was developed and completely studied to counter the abovementioned challenges. The results show that the proposed architecture can enhance the DER system’s effective integration, security in data communication and transparency for interoperability. The novel and advanced concepts involve first modeling the topology of the photovoltaic (PV) station to IEC 61850 information models according to the IEC 61850-7-4 logical nodes and the DER-specific logical nodes defined in IEC 61850-7-420. This guarantees the interoperability between DER and DER, DER and utility and DER and the energy service operator. The second step was to map the information models to IEC 61850-8-2 XMPP for the specific communication protocol in DER applications. XMPP protocol, a publish/subscribe communication mechanism, is recommended in DER applications because of its characteristics of cybersecurity and authenticated encryption. After that we enabled the edge computing capability for data processing and the analytics of the DER side for time-critical missions. The aggregated data was then sent to the control center in the cloud. By applying the edge computing architecture, the system reduced decision latency, improved data privacy and enhanced security. The goal of this paper was to introduce the practical methodologies of these novel concepts to academics and industrial engineers.