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Received: January 10th, 2022 ; Accepted: February 23rd, 2022 ; Published: April 1st, 2022 ; Correspondence: giovanni.argenti@unifi.it Medicago sativa is a legume forage crop characterized by high production of forage, with a notable nutritive value, but in mountain areas duration of the crop could be remarkably affected by severe environmental conditions. To assess the vegetation evolution of lucerne crops in relation to crop age, data from fields of lucerne of different ages were collected. The aim is the evaluation of lucerne productive performances, evolution of forage quality and assessment of recovery by autochthonous species that naturally recolonize the studied areas in relation to age of the cropped species. With increasing years, lucerne population was significantly decreased and replaced by different functional types of plants, such as perennial graminoids and short-lived forbs. Biodiversity increased significantly along time, and evolution of similarity indices demonstrated an evolution of vegetation toward that represented by reference grassland of the area. Productive characteristics of forage, in terms of aboveground biomass and quality, were negatively affected by age. Results permitted to assess the evolution of different features of lucerne for a mountain environment and to hypothesize the appropriate management for this resource, that could contemplate also the evolution towards the reconstitution of the reference habitat for the studied area.

Received: January 5th, 2021 ; Accepted: April 7th, 2021 ; Published: May 4th, 2021 ; Correspondence: giovanni.argenti@unifi.it Sown meadows, encompassing alfalfa and grass-legume mixtures, are the forage crops on which is based Parmesan cheese production system in the mountain area of the Apennines (central Italy). These grassland types experience, during their development, deep changes in terms of production potentiality, botanical composition and forage quality, thus these meadows have to be periodically renewed to guarantee adequate productive and qualitative performances. To have an accurate assessment of this evolution along time, a survey was performed in different mountain farms inside the Parmesan cheese consortium, analysing alfalfa meadows and grass-legumes mixtures of different ages. Grasslands were monitored during 2019, performing three samplings during growing season. Aboveground biomass production, botanical composition and crude protein content were collected during the survey. Results permitted to evaluate the level of production decrease along years, the evolution of analysed parameters among cutting dates and the dependence of productive and qualitative features on botanical composition and presence of sown species in the swards. Results were useful to hypothesize the composition of future mixtures, to improve management issues and to delineate the possible duration of sown meadows for the area with respect to different purposes in terms of desired productive or qualitative objectives.

Background and Aims: The Diverticular Inflammation and Complication Assessment (DICA) endoscopic classification of diverticulosis and diverticular disease (DD) is currently available. It scores severity of the disease as DICA 1, DICA 2 and DICA 3. Our aim was to assess the agreement on this classification in an international endoscopists community setting. Methods: A total of 96 doctors (82.9% endoscopists) independently scored a set of DD endoscopic videos. The percentages of overall agreement on DICA score and a free-marginal multirater kappa (κ) coefficient were reported as statistical measures of interrater agreement. Results: Overall agreement in using DICA was 91.8% with a free-marginal kappa of 88% (95% CI 80-95). The overall agreement levels were: DICA 1, 85.2%; DICA 2, 96.5%; DICA 3, 99.5%. The free marginal κ was: DICA 1 = 0.753, DICA 2 = 0.958, DICA 3 = 0.919. The agreement about the main endoscopic items was 83.4% (k 67%) for diverticular extension, 62.6% (k 65%) for number of diverticula for each district, 86.8% (k 82%) for presence of inflammation, and 98.5 (k 98%) for presence of complications. Conclusions: The overall interrater agreement in this study ranges from good to very good. DICA score is a simple and reproducible endoscopic scoring system for diverticulosis and DD.

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is one of the largest scientific instruments ever built. Since opening up anew energy frontier for exploration in 2010, it has gathered a global user community of about 9000 scientists working in fundamental particle physics and the physics of hadronic matter at extreme temperature and density. To sustain and extend its discovery potential, the LHC will need a major upgrade in the 2020s. This will increase its instantaneous luminosity (rate of collisions) by a factor of five beyond the original design valueand the integrated luminosity (totalnumber of collisions) by a factor ten. The LHC is already a highly complexand exquisitely optimised machine so this upgrade must be carefully conceived and will require new infrastructures(underground and on surface)and over a decade to implement. The new configuration, known as High Luminosity LHC (HL-LHC), relies on a number of key innovations that push accelerator technology beyond its present limits. Among these are cutting-edge 11–12Tesla superconducting magnets, compact superconducting cavities for beam rotation with ultra-precise phase control, new technology and physical processes for beam collimation and 100 metre-long high-power superconducting links with negligible energy dissipation, all of which required several years of dedicated R&D; effort on a global international level. The present document describes the technologies and components that will be used to realise the projectand is intended to serve as the basis for the detailed engineering design of the HL-LHC.

El proyecto multidisciplinar TREASURE tiene como objetivo principal caracterizar la diversidad de razas locales y sistemas de producción para productos sostenibles y de alta calidad. Uno de los principales objetivos del proyecto consiste en la caracterización de la diversidad genética de una serie de razas locales, incluidas la alentejana y la ibérica, mediante el uso de variantes genéticas/ polimorfismos que son variaciones en la secuencia del ADN entre los individuos de una población. Para llevar a cabo esta caracterización, se genotiparon variantes genéticas en individuos ibéricos, alentejanos y en otras 18 razas autóctonas de porcino. Teniendo en cuenta los resultados obtenidos en el presente estudio, los cuales muestran una cercanía genética muy grande en las variantes genéticas analizadas, podría deducirse que las razas ibéricas y alentejana fueran estirpes pertenecientes a una misma raza, más que razas independientes por sí misma. Dentro del proyecto TREASURE se están realizando análisis utilizando un mayor número de información genética a lo largo de todo el genoma para corroborar los resultados mostrados en el presente estudio. Estos resultados junto con la información para el resto de poblaciones será presentada en un futuro.

Knowledge of protein requirements of pigs during the first phase of life is crucial for both achieving high growth rates and avoiding nitrogen waste. Autochthonous breeds possess specific requirements in this regard and the literature is poor even for the Cinta Senese breed. Thus, the effect of different level of crude protein (CP) in Cinta Senese pigs, between 30 and 60 kg, was evaluated within the TREASURE* project. Twelve male pigs were individually reared indoor, fed with four isoenergetic diets with different levels of CP (18, 16, 14 and 12%) equally distributed among animals. The animals, with an initial average live weight of 27 kg, were fed ad libitum and slaughtered after 2 months of trial. Left side carcass was sectioned in six cuts: head, neck, loin, shoulder, ham and ribs. Each cut has been dissected into the main tissues. As regards in vita performance a slightly higher growth rates with decreasing protein levels were recorded (ADG of 0.781, 0.774, 0.755 and 0.729 kg/d respectively for 12, 14, 16 and 18% of CP), though only the two extreme levels of CP (12 vs 18%) resulted statistically different (P=0.05). Cuts weights and percentage of the main tissues were similar between diets. The diet with 12% of CP may be the optimal compromise for the growth of the Cinta Senese pigs from 30 to 60 kg of live weight.

The paper reports the results of a survey on the demographic and phenotypic characterization of 20 European local pig breeds involved in the H2020 TREASURE project including information on: demographic parameters, main morphological features, reproductive information, additional information collected at herd-level (i.e. temperament, holding, mating practices), origins and development of the breeds. Almost all the breeds (18 out of 20) possess a herd book even if the starting year is highly variable (from 1980 to 2006). Number of breeding females ranged from 24 (Moravka) to over 200,000 heads (Ibérico). Male/female ratio varied greatly with the highest values for the Italian breeds probably due to the different policy of animal recording. Almost all the breeds undergo a conservation program whereas really few are interested by other conservation techniques and for less than five breeds data related to effective number and inbreeding coefficient are easily available. Average values for teat number, litter size and weaned piglets are 12, 8 and 6 respectively with a great potential for their improvement. The depicted scenario is highly diversified and the data collected represent the starting point for the achievement of a collective trademark under the umbrella of the TREASURE project. FE1B-06B2-126F | José Pedro Pinto de Araújo N/A

In Cinta Senese meat, polyunsaturated fatty acids (PUFA) only consists in the 10-11% of total fat. Moreover, the eicosapentaenoic and docosahexaenoic acids are not present in pork meat, but they are very abundant in fish products. In order to enhance Cinta Senese burgers healthiness, microencapsulated (M) and bulk fish oil (F) were added. The burgers were divided in three groups and underwent three different storage conditions: no storage (T0), chilled storage (T5) and frozen storage (T30). Fatty acid profile and lipid oxidation of enriched burgers were investigated after cooking. M burgers showed significantly higher amount of PUFA at T0 and T5, in particular omega-3 PUFA resulted significantly higher in M samples at T0, T5 and T30. TBARs resulted to be influenced by addition, with significantly higher values in F burgers. In conclusion, fish oil microencapsulation technique appears to be effective to enrich meat in omega-3 fatty acids, protecting added PUFA from oxidation.

Despite the growing diffusion of cosmopolite specialized breeds, several autochthonous cattle breeds and populations are still bred in Italy. The aim of this study was to provide a high-resolution picture of the genome-wide diversity and population structure of Italian local cattle breeds using medium-density genome-wide SNP markers. After data editing, the dataset included 800 samples from 32 breeds that were genotyped for 31 013 SNPs. For several breeds we observed a low level of polymorphism and genetic diversity, that together with the small effective population sizes confirmed threat of extinction. According to the runs of homozygosity analysis, evidence of recent inbreeding was strong in some breeds. Low pair-wise genetic differentiation values, shared ancestry, admixture events, and reticulations observed on the phylogenetic tree between some breeds, all suggest high levels of gene flow. Clear clusters and relationships between breeds that originated from the same region or area were detected. However, in spite the complex admixture history of most breeds, many of the local Italian cattle breeds have retained unique identities and are differentiated breeds, and this can be due to differences in the origin, differences in climate, genetic isolation and inbreeding. This study represents the first exhaustive analysis of Italian cattle diversity. The results largely agreed with the breeding history of the Italian cattle breeds. The population structure and the low genetic diversity presented here for several breeds should be useful in creating conservation strategies. If reproductive isolation within groups of the same herd and area is maintained in subsequent generations, the short-term rate of inbreeding will increase dangerously, resulting in a decrease in the effective population size and seriously damaging the breeds future. Thus, efforts should be made to improve genetic diversity in these breeds. In particular, mating decisions will play an important role in limiting inbreeding and will increase the size of these local breeds.

pig breed genomes opened a new area of genomic research focused on variation caused by single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNP), small scale variation and structural variants which may all contribute to phenotypic variation among pig breeds. In our study (performed within TREASURE project) we re-analysed WGS-based data sets from more than 20 breeds, including commercial and local breeds as well as some wild boar genomes, deposited in publicly available databases. This bioinformatics tool enables discovery of new SNPs, estimation of allele frequencies (genotyping by sequencing) at candidate loci and identification of structural variation in a wide range of pig breeds. The analysis underlined the relevance of structural differences at KIT and MC1R locus involved in colour pattern formation, as well as LEPR locus associated with fatness, fatty acid metabolism and intramuscular fat composition. This approach allows discovery of important genomic differences between commercial breeds and local breeds which are analysed in the frame of the TREASURE project. Extensive mining of publicly available genomic data can together with the newly generated genomic information from local breeds, significantly contribute to the detailed characterisation of animal genetic resources present in local pig breeds. Funded by European Union’s H2020 RIA program (grant agreement No. 634476).