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Chicken is widely favored by consumers because of some unique features. The leg muscles occupy an important position in the market. However, the specific mechanism for regulating muscle growth speed is not clear. In this experiment, we used Jinghai yellow chickens with different body weights at 300 days as research subjects. The chickens were divided into fast- and slow-growing groups, and we collected leg muscles after slaughtering for use in RNA-seq. After comparing the two groups, 87 differentially expressed genes (DEGs) were identified (fold change ≥ 2 and FDR < 0.05). The fast-growing group had 42 up-regulated genes and 45 down-regulated genes among these DEGs compared to the slow-growing group. Six items were significantly enriched in the biological process: embryo development ending in birth or egg hatching, chordate embryonic development, embryonic skeletal system development, and embryo development as well as responses to ketones and the sulfur compound biosynthetic process. Two significantly enriched pathways were found in the KEGG pathway analysis (P-value < 0.05): the insulin signaling pathway and the adipocytokine signaling pathway. This study provides a theoretical basis for the molecular mechanism of chicken growth and for improving the production of Jinghai yellow chicken. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this paper is to introduce a transmission power control scheme based on the remaining energy level and the energy-harvesting status of individual sensor nodes to extend the overall lifetime of wireless sensor networks (WSNs) and balance the energy usage. Ambient energy harvesting has been introduced as a promising technique to solve the energy constraint problem of WSNs. However, considering the tiny equipment and the inherent low and unbalanced harvesting capability due to environmental issues, there is still a long distance from perfectly solving the problem. In this paper, a wind and solar power joint-harvested WSN system has been demonstrated, which uses ultracapacitor as energy storage. By analyzing the power recharging, leakage, and energy consumption rate, a novel energy-level-based transmission power control scheme (EL-TPC) is produced. In EL-TPC scheme, the transmission power is classified into various levels according to the remaining energy level. By adapting the nodes' operation pattern, hierarchical network architecture can be formed, which prioritizes the use of high energy level, fast charging nodes to save the energy of uncharged nodes. The simulation and demonstration results show that EL-TPC scheme can significantly balance the energy consumption and extend the entire network lifetime. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Combinatorial maps explicitly encode orientations of edges around vertices, and have been used in many fields. In this paper, we address the problem of searching for patterns in model maps by putting forward the concept of symbol graph. A symbol graph will be constructed and stored for each model map in the preprocessing. Furthermore, an algorithm for submap isomorphism is presented based on symbol sequence searching in the symbol graphs. The computational complexity of this algorithm is quadratic in the worst case if we neglect the preprocessing step. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

In the era of Big Data, integrating information from multiple sources has proven valuable in various fields. To ensure a high-quality supply of multi-source data, repairing different types of errors in the multi-source data becomes critical. This paper categorizes errors in multi-source data into entity information overlapping, attribute value conflicts, and attribute value inconsistencies. We first summarize existing repairing methods for these errors and then examine and review the study of the detection and repair of compound-type errors in multi-source data. Finally, we indicate further research directions in multi-source data repair. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A novel precolumn derivatization–GC-MS/MS method was developed for the determination of decoquinate residues in chicken tissues (muscle, liver, and kidney). The samples were extracted and purified by liquid–liquid extraction combined with solid-phase extraction and derivatized with acetic anhydride and pyridine. The recovery rates for decoquinate were 77.38~89.65%, and the intra-day and inter-day RSDs were 1.63~5.74% and 2.27~8.06%, respectively. The technique parameters meet the necessities for veterinary drug residue detection in China, the US, and the EU. Finally, the method was applied to analyze tissues of 60 chickens bought from a neighborhood supermarket, and solely one sample of chicken muscle contained 15.6 μg/kg decoquinate residue. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Simple Summary: Elucidating the molecular mechanisms that regulate the growth and development of skeletal muscle is an essential prerequisite for using molecular breeding technology to improve the meat production of pigeons. In the present study, we characterized the expression of miRNAs and mRNAs in pigeon skeletal muscle at two embryonic stages (E8 and E13) and two growth stages (D1 and D10). A total of 839 DEmiRNAs and 11,311 DEGs were identified among the four groups. An miRNA–mRNA network was constructed by correlation analysis and target prediction between DEmiRNAs and DEGs. Based on the connectivity degree, twenty potential hub miRNAs responsible for pigeon skeletal muscle development and growth were identified, including cli-miR-20b-5p, miR-130-y, cli-miR-106-5p, cli-miR-181b-5p, miR-1-z, etc. GO and KEGG enrichment analysis identified candidate biological processes and pathways related to pigeon skeletal muscle development and growth. Our results provide a database for further investigating the miRNA–mRNA regulatory mechanism underlying pigeon skeletal muscle development and growth. The growth and development of skeletal muscle determine the productivity of pigeon meat production, and miRNA plays an important role in the growth and development of this type of muscle. However, there are few reports regarding miRNA regulating the growth and development of skeletal muscle in pigeons. To explore the function of miRNA in regulating the growth and development of pigeon skeletal muscle, we used RNA sequencing technology to study the transcriptome of pigeons at two embryonic stages (E8 and E13) and two growth stages (D1 and D10). A total of 32,527 mRNAs were identified in pigeon skeletal muscles, including 14,378 novel mRNAs and 18,149 known mRNAs. A total of 2362 miRNAs were identified, including 1758 known miRNAs and 624 novel miRNAs. In total, 839 differentially expressed miRNAs (DEmiRNAs) and 11,311 differentially expressed mRNAs (DEGs) were identified. STEM clustering analysis assigned DEmiRNAs to 20 profiles, of which 7 were significantly enriched (p-value < 0.05). These seven significantly enriched profiles can be classified into two categories. The first category represents DEmiRNAs continuously downregulated from the developmental stage to the growth stage of pigeon skeletal muscle, and the second category represents DEmiRNAs with low expression at the development and early growth stage, and significant upregulation at the high growth stage. We then constructed an miRNA–mRNA network based on target relationships between DEmiRNAs and DEGs belonging to the seven significantly enriched profiles. Based on the connectivity degree, 20 hub miRNAs responsible for pigeon skeletal muscle development and growth were identified, including cli-miR-20b-5p, miR-130-y, cli-miR-106-5p, cli-miR-181b-5p, miR-1-z, cli-miR-1a-3p, miR-23-y, cli-miR-30d-5p, miR-1-y, etc. The hub miRNAs involved in the miRNA–mRNA regulatory networks and their expression patterns during the development and growth of pigeon skeletal muscle were visualized. GO and KEGG enrichment analysis found potential biological processes and pathways related to muscle growth and development. Our findings expand the knowledge of miRNA expression in pigeons and provide a database for further investigation of the miRNA–mRNA regulatory mechanism underlying pigeon skeletal muscle development and growth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Proliferation, differentiation, and apoptosis are three essential stages in cell development, and miRNAs can achieve extensive regulation of cellular developmental processes by repressing the expression of target genes. According to our previous RNA-seq results, miRNA-10a-5p was differentially expressed at different periods in chicken myoblasts, revealing a possible association with muscle development. In this study, we concluded that miRNA-10a-5p inhibited chicken myoblasts' proliferation and differentiation and promoted chicken myoblasts' apoptosis by directly targeting BCL6, a critical transcription factor involved in muscle development and regeneration. Overexpression of BCL6 significantly facilitated myoblasts' proliferation and differentiation and suppressed myoblasts' apoptosis. On the contrary, knockdown of BCL6 significantly repressed myoblasts' proliferation and differentiation and induced myoblasts' apoptosis. The results above suggest that miRNA-10a-5p plays a potential role in skeletal muscle growth, development and autophagy by targeting the BCL6 gene. We first revealed the functions of miRNA-10a-5p and BCL6 in the proliferation, differentiation, and apoptosis of chicken myoblasts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Location information acquisition is crucial for many wireless sensor network (WSN) applications. While existing localization approaches mainly focus on 2D plane, the emerging 3D localization brings WSNs closer to reality with much enhanced accuracy. Two types of 3D localization algorithms are mainly used in localization application: the range-based localization and the range-free localization. The range-based localization algorithm has strict requirements on hardware and therefore is costly to implement in practice. The range-free localization algorithm reduces the hardware cost but at the expense of low localization accuracy. On addressing the shortage of both algorithms, in this paper, we develop a novel hybrid localization scheme, which utilizes the range-based attribute RSSI and the range-free attribute hopsize, to achieve accurate yet low-cost 3D localization. As anchor node deployment strategy plays an important role in improving the localization accuracy, an anchor node configuration scheme is also developed in this work by utilizing the MIS (maximal independent set) of a network. With proper anchor node configuration and propagation model selection, using simulations, we show that our proposed algorithm improves the localization accuracy by 38.9% compared with 3D DV-HOP and 52.7% compared with 3D centroid. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Coccidiosis is an important parasitic protozoan disease in poultry farming, causing huge economic losses in the global poultry industry every year. MicroRNAs (miRNAs) are a class of RNA macromolecules that play important roles in the immune response to pathogens. However, the expression profiles and functions of miRNAs during Eimeria tenella (E. tenella) infection in chickens remain mostly uncharacterized. In this study, high-throughput sequencing of cecal tissues of control (JC), resistant (JR), and susceptible (JS) chickens led to the identification of 35 differentially expressed miRNAs among the three groups. Functional enrichment analysis showed that the differentially expressed miRNAs were mainly associated with the TGF-beta, NF-kB, and Jak-STAT signaling pathways. Notably, gga-miR-2954 was found to be significantly upregulated after coccidial infection. Functional analysis showed that gga-miR-2954 inhibited the production of the inflammatory cytokines IL-6, IL-1β, TNF-α, and IL-8 in sporozoite-stimulated DF-1 cells. Mechanistically, we found that gga-miR-2954 targeted the RORC gene and that RORC promoted the inflammatory response in sporozoite-stimulated DF-1 cells. In conclusion, our study was the first to identify differentially expressed miRNAs in chicken cecal tissue during E. tenella infection and found that gga-miR-2954 regulates the host immune response to coccidial infection in chickens by targeting the RORC gene. • The differentially expressed miRNAs were identified in chicken cecal tissues after E. tenella infection. • A candidate miRNA (gga-miRNA-2954) inhibits the inflammatory response of DF-1 cells stimulated by sporozoites • RORC is the target gene of gga-miR-2954 • RORC gene promotes the inflammatory response of DF-1 cells stimulated by sporozoites [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes a distributed localization algorithm which can be applied to an irregular three-dimensional wireless sensor network, considering the algorithm accuracy and complexity. The algorithm uses clusters to eliminate the multihop distance errors. An anchor node position optimization scheme is proposed to maximize the uniformity of each subnetwork. The proposed algorithm also employs a new three-dimensional coordinate transformation algorithm, which helps to reduce the errors introduced by coordinate integration between clusters and improves the localization precision. The simulation and performance analysis results show that the localization accuracy of the D3D-MDS algorithm increases by 49.1% compared with 3D-DV-HOP and 38.6% compared with 3D-MDS-MAP. This distributed localization scheme also demonstrates a low computational complexity compared with other centralized localization algorithms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Providing temporal isolation between critical activities has been an important design criterion in real-time open systems, which can be achieved using resource reservation techniques. As an abstraction of reservation servers, virtual processor is often used to represent a portion of computing power available on a physical platform while hiding the implementation details. In this paper, we present a general framework of partitioning an application comprised of hard real-time tasks with precedence constraints onto multiple virtual processors in consideration of communication latencies between tasks. A novel method is proposed for assigning deadlines and activation times to tasks such that tasks partitioned onto different virtual processors can be analyzed separately using well-established theories for uniprocessor. Extensive simulations have been performed and the results have shown that, compared to existing algorithms, the proposed method achieves better performance in terms of minimizing both total bandwidth and the maximum individual bandwidth. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Neuroelectric signals recorded by micro-electrodes reflect the spontaneous and rhythmic activities of brain neurons. Numerous deep learning frameworks have been designed for various neuroelectric signal decoding tasks, most of which are based on convolutional neural network (CNN) and recurrent neural network (RNN). However, neither CNNs or RNNs can perceive the global dependencies of neural activities in both time and channel dimensions. To address this issue, this paper presents a temporal-channel cascaded transformer network to decode the neural activities of imagined handwriting movements, which can perform imagined handwriting character recognition from spiking activity recorded by two micro-electrode arrays (MEAs). Specifically, we design a temporal-channel cascaded framework and a dense residual transformer encoder structure, which can promote the hierarchical learning and fusion of the temporal and channel features. In addition, a mutual learning strategy of multiple class tokens is proposed to improve classification performance. We conduct performance evaluation experiments on a single-character handwriting-imagination dataset and a sentence handwriting-imagination dataset, which are collected from the public Handwriting BCI dataset. The comparison results demonstrate the superiority of the proposed framework and strategy. Especially in the imagined single-character recognition task, the recognition accuracy of our model can achieve 95.78%, which provides an improvement of + 2 % over the existing state of the art models. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In control devices for the Internet of Things (IoT), energy is one of the critical restriction factors. Dynamic voltage scaling (DVS) has been proved to be an effective method for reducing the energy consumption of processors. This paper proposes an energy-efficient scheduling algorithm for IoT control devices with hard real-time control tasks (HRCTs) and soft real-time tasks (SRTs). The main contribution of this paper includes two parts. First, it builds the Hybrid tasks with multi-subtasks of different function Weight (HoW) task model for IoT control devices. HoW describes the structure of HRCTs and SRTs, and their properties, e.g., deadlines, execution time, preemption properties, and energy-saving goals, etc. Second, it presents the Hybrid Tasks' Dynamic Voltage Scaling (HTDVS) algorithm. HTDVS first sets the slowdown factors of subtasks while meeting the different real-time requirements of HRCTs and SRTs, and then dynamically reclaims, reserves, and reuses the slack time of the subtasks to meet their ideal energy-saving goals. Experimental results show HTDVS can reduce energy consumption about 10%-80% while meeting the real-time requirements of HRCTs, HRCTs help to reduce the deadline miss ratio (DMR) of systems, and HTDVS has comparable performance with the greedy algorithm and is more favorable to keep the subtasks' ideal speeds. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we will describe the main results of the activity aimed to develop a prototype of superconducting receiver front-end (HTS RFE) for specific application in UMTS network. The system has been specifically designed to reach very low noise figure on the receiving channel to exploit the best performance in terms of sensitivity of the up-link channel. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Growth performance is significant in broiler production. In the growth process of broilers, gene expression varies at different growth stages. However, limited research has been conducted on the molecular mechanisms of muscle growth and development in yellow-feathered male chickens. Results: In the study, we used RNA-seq to study the transcriptome of the breast muscle of male Jinghai yellow chickens at 4 (M4F), 8 (M8F) and 12 weeks (M12F) of age. The results showed that 4608 differentially expressed genes (DEGs) were obtained by comparison in pairs of the three groups with Fold Change (FC) ≥ 2 and False Discovery Rate (FDR) ≤ 0.05, and 83, 3445 and 3903 DEGs were obtained separately from M4FvsM8F, M4FvsM12F and M8FvsM12F. Six genes were found as co-differentially expressed in the three age groups, namely SNCG, MYH1A, ARHGDIB, ENSGALG00000031598, ENSGALG00000035660 and ENSGALG00000030559. The GO analysis showed that 0, 304 and 408 biological process (BP) were significantly enriched in M4FvsM8F, M4FvsM12F and M8FvsM12F groups, respectively. KEGG pathway enrichment showed that 1, 2, 4 and 4 pathways were significantly enriched in M4FvsM8F, M4FvsM12F, M8FvsM12F and all DEGs, respectively. They were steroid biosynthesis, carbon metabolism, focal adhesion, cytokine-cytokine receptor interaction, biosynthesis of amino acids and salmonella infection. We constructed short hairpin RNA (shRNA) to interfere the differentially expressed gene RAC2 in DF-1 cells and detected mRNA and protein expression of the downstream genes PAK1 and MAPK8. Results of qPCR showed that RAC2, PAK1 and MAPK8 mRNA expression significantly decreased in the shRAC2–2 group compared with the negative control (NC) group. Western Blot (WB) results showed that the proteins of RAC2, PAK1 and MAPK8 also decreased in the shRAC2–2 group. Cell Counting Kit-8 (CCK-8) and 5-Ethynyl-2′-deoxyuridine (EdU) assay both showed that the proliferation of DF-1 cells was significantly inhibited after transfection of shRAC2–2. Conclusions: The results of RNA-seq revealed genes, BP terms and KEGG pathways related to growth and development of male Jinghai yellow chickens, and they would have important guiding significance to our production practice. Further research suggested that RAC2 might regulate cell proliferation by regulating PAKs/MAPK8 pathway and affect growth of chickens. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Weakly-supervised multi-label learning has emerged as a hot topic more recently. Most existing methods deal with such problem by learning from the data where the label assignments are incomplete while the feature information is ideal. However, in many real applications, due to the influence of occlusion, illumination and low-resolution, the acquired features are often noisy, which may reduce the robustness of the learning model. In this paper, to overcome the above shortcoming, we propose a novel weakly-supervised multi-label learning framework called WML-LSC, where the low-rank and sparse constrain schemes are jointly incorporated to capture the desired feature information. Specifically, we first decompose the observed feature matrix into an ideal feature matrix and an outlier matrix. Considering that similar instances usually share similar visual characteristics, we constrain the ideal feature matrix to be low-rank. Meanwhile, a reasonable assumption is that the noise is sparse compared with the feature matrix, which leads outlier matrix to be sparse. In addition, a linear self-recovery model is adopted to reconstruct the incomplete label assignment matrix by exploiting label correlations. Finally, the desired model is trained on the ideal feature matrix and the refined label matrix. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that our proposed method can achieve superior and comparable performance against state-of-the-art methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Partial label learning (PLL) aims to learn from the data where each training instance is associated with a set of candidate labels, among which only one is correct. Most existing methods deal with this type of problem by either treating each candidate label equally or identifying the ground-truth label iteratively. In this article, we propose a novel PLL approach named HERA, which simultaneously incorporates the HeterogEneous Loss and the SpaRse and Low-rAnk procedure to estimate the labeling confidence for each instance while training the desired model. Specifically, the heterogeneous loss integrates the strengths of both the pairwise ranking loss and the pointwise reconstruction loss to provide informative label ranking and reconstruction information for label identification, whereas the embedded sparse and low-rank scheme constrains the sparsity of ground-truth label matrix and the low rank of noise label matrix to explore the global label relevance among the whole training data, for improving the learning model. Comprehensive ablation study demonstrates the effectiveness of our employed heterogeneous loss, and extensive experiments on both artificial and real-world datasets demonstrate that our method achieves superior or comparable performance against state-of-the-art methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In partial label learning, each training instance is assigned with a set of candidate labels, among which only one is correct. An intuitive strategy to learn from such ambiguous data is disambiguation. Existing methods following such strategy either identify the ground-truth label via treating each candidate label equally or disambiguate the candidate label set via assuming latent variable and optimizing it iteratively. In this paper, we propose a novel two-stage method called partial label learning via low-rank representation and label propagation, where instance similarity and label confidence are taken into consideration to improve the disambiguation ability of the model. In the first stage, we first build the global instance–similarity relationship via low rank representation and sparse constraint and then obtain the accurate instance-label assignments via iterative label propagation strategy. In the second stage, we utilize the Adaboost.R2 to make prediction for unseen instances, where CART is incorporated as the weak classifier. Extensive experiments on the artificial and real-world data sets demonstrate that the proposed method can achieve superior or comparable performance than the comparing state-of-the-art approaches. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A high-performance liquid chromatography – fluorescence detection (HPLC-FLD) method was established for the determination of piperazine residues in whole eggs, albumen, and yolk employing pre-column derivatization with dansyl chloride. The egg samples were treated by accelerated solvent extraction (ASE) and the analytes purified by solid phase extraction (SPE). Acetonitrile/ultrapure water was used as the mobile phase for gradient elution. The linear dynamic range was from 6.80 to 200.0 µg/kg for whole eggs, 7.50 to 200.0 µg/kg for albumen, and 6.50 to 200.0 µg/kg for yolk with coefficients of determination (R2) greater than or equal to 0.9992. The average recoveries of piperazine from egg samples were from 72.86 to 89.26% when the concentrations were equal to the limit of quantification, 0.5 times the maximum residue limit, equal to the maximum residue limit, and twice the maximum residue limits. The relative standard deviations were between 1.73 and 4.99%. The limits of detection of piperazine in eggs were from 1.92 to 2.50 µg/kg, and the limits of quantification were between 6.50 and 7.50 µg/kg. The method meets the requirements of the European Union, the Ministry of Agriculture of the People's Republic of China and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for the determination of veterinary drug residues. The validated HPLC-FLD method was successfully applied to the determination of piperazine residues in 50 eggs purchased from local supermarkets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Accelerated solvent extraction (ASE) and solid‐phase extraction (SPE) conditions were optimized by a high‐performance liquid chromatography‐fluorescence detector (HPLC‐FLD) method for the detection of piperazine in chicken tissues and pork. Piperazine residues were determined by precolumn derivatization with trimethylamine and dansyl chloride. Samples were extracted with 2% formic acid in acetonitrile using an ASE apparatus and purified using a Strata‐X‐C SPE column. The monosubstituted product of the reaction of piperazine with dansyl chloride was 1‐dansyl piperazine (1‐DNS‐piperazine). Chromatographic separations were performed on an Athena C18 column (250 × 4.6 mm, id: 5 μm) with gradient elution using ultrapure water and acetonitrile (5:95, V/V) as the mobile phase. The calibration curves showed good linearity over a concentration range of LOQ‐200.0 μg/kg with a coefficient of determination (R2) ≥ .9992. The recoveries and relative standard deviations (RSD values) ranged from 78.49% to 97.56% and 1.19% to 5.32%, respectively, across the limit of quantification (LOQ) and 0.5, 1, and 2.0 times the maximum residue limit (MRL; μg/kg). The limits of detection (LODs) and LOQs were 0.96 to 1.85 μg/kg and 3.20 to 5.50 μg/kg, respectively. The method was successfully applied for the validation of animal products in the laboratory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Fatigue driving can easily lead to road traffic accidents and bring great harm to individuals and families. Recently, electroencephalography- (EEG-) based physiological and brain activities for fatigue detection have been increasingly investigated. However, how to find an effective method or model to timely and efficiently detect the mental states of drivers still remains a challenge. In this paper, we combine common spatial pattern (CSP) and propose a light-weighted classifier, LightFD, which is based on gradient boosting framework for EEG mental states identification. The comparable results with traditional classifiers, such as support vector machine (SVM), convolutional neural network (CNN), gated recurrent unit (GRU), and large margin nearest neighbor (LMNN), show that the proposed model could achieve better classification performance, as well as the decision efficiency. Furthermore, we also test and validate that LightFD has better transfer learning performance in EEG classification of driver mental states. In summary, our proposed LightFD classifier has better performance in real-time EEG mental state prediction, and it is expected to have broad application prospects in practical brain-computer interaction (BCI). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• TAP, FF and FFA was monitored and determined by UPLC-FLD. • A new method is used to detect TAP, FF and FFA residues in poultry meat and pork. • ASE was investigated as a rapid and automated approach. • The method provides reliable accuracy for determining TAP, FF and FFA. A method of accelerated solvent extraction coupled with ultra-performance liquid chromatography-fluorescence detection (ASE-UPLC-FLD) for the simultaneous detection of thiamphenicol, florfenicol and florfenicol amine residues in poultry meats (chicken muscle, duck muscle and goose muscle) and pork was developed and optimized. Samples were extracted with ASE using ethyl acetate:aqueous ammonia (98:2,V/V) as the extractant and purified with n-hexane saturated with ethyl acetate. Then, the samples were analyzed by UPLC-FLD. The excitation wavelength and emission wavelength of the fluorescence detector were 233 nm and 284 nm, respectively. The parameters of the optimized method were validated according to the requirements of the European Union and the Food and Drug Administration. The recoveries of the three analytes from poultry meats and pork at the limit of quantification (LOQ), 0.5 MRL (maximum residue limit), 1.0 MRL and 2.0 MRL were 80.80–98.35%, the relative standard deviations (RSDs) were less than 4.63%, and the intraday and interday RSDs were 2.22–5.54% and 2.42–6.08%, respectively. The limits of detection (LODs) and the LOQs were 1.0–4.2 μg/kg and 3.0–11.4 μg/kg, respectively. The new method was successfully applied for the quantitative determination of thiamphenicol, florfenicol and florfenicol amine residues in 40 poultry meat and pork samples from local supermarkets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• A bidirectional distillation strategy is proposed to realize the information interaction between hybrid networks. • BIHN optimizes the performance of both CogN and ComN in EEG cognitive recognition by using a bidirectional feedback mode. • Experimental results show the superior performance of BIHN in cognitive recognition compared to many SOTA models. • The BIHN architecture is suitable for various hybrid network pairs related to cognitive and computational networks. Background and objective: Extracting cognitive representation and computational representation information simultaneously from electroencephalography (EEG) data and constructing corresponding information interaction models can effectively improve the recognition capability of brain cognitive status. However, due to the huge gap in the interaction between the two types of information, existing studies have yet to consider the advantages of the interaction of both. Methods: This paper introduces a novel architecture named the bidirectional interaction-based hybrid network (BIHN) for EEG cognitive recognition. BIHN consists of two networks: a cognitive-based network named CogN (e.g., graph convolution network, GCN; capsule network, CapsNet) and a computing-based network named ComN (e.g., EEGNet). CogN is responsible for extracting cognitive representation features from EEG data, while ComN is responsible for extracting computational representation features. Additionally, a bidirectional distillation-based coadaptation (BDC) algorithm is proposed to facilitate information interaction between CogN and ComN to realize the coadaptation of the two networks through bidirectional closed-loop feedback. Results: Cross-subject cognitive recognition experiments were performed on the Fatigue-Awake EEG dataset (FAAD, 2-class classification) and SEED dataset (3-class classification), and hybrid network pairs of GCN + EEGNet and CapsNet + EEGNet were verified. The proposed method achieved average accuracies of 78.76% (GCN + EEGNet) and 77.58% (CapsNet + EEGNet) on FAAD and 55.38% (GCN + EEGNet) and 55.10% (CapsNet + EEGNet) on SEED, outperforming the hybrid networks without the bidirectional interaction strategy. Conclusions: Experimental results show that BIHN can achieve superior performance on two EEG datasets and enhance the ability of both CogN and ComN in EEG processing as well as cognitive recognition. We also validated its effectiveness with different hybrid network pairs. The proposed method could greatly promote the development of brain-computer collaborative intelligence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A widely applicable method involving liquid chromatography-electrospray ionization tandem triple quadrupole mass spectrometry (LC-ESI/MS/MS) was developed for the simultaneous determination of chloramphenicol, thiamphenicol, florfenicol, and florfenicol amine in eggs. Samples were extracted with ethyl acetate-acetonitrile-ammonium hydroxide (49:49:2, v/v) and defatted with hexane saturated with acetonitrile. The analysis was carried out on a mass spectrometer via an electrospray interface operated in the positive and negative ionization modes using deuterated chloramphenicol-d5 as the internal standard. The limits of detection and limits of quantification were 0.04–0.5 μg/kg and 0.1–1.5 μg/kg in eggs, respectively. The average recoveries of the four analytes from egg samples were 90.84–108.23%, with relative standard deviations of less than 9.61%. The corresponding intra-day and inter-day variations were found to be less than 8.11% and 11.30%, respectively. Finally, the new approach was successfully applied to the quantitative determination of these analytes in 50 commercial eggs from local supermarkets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An accelerated solvent extraction coupled with gas chromatography‐tandem mass spectrometry (ASE‐GC‐MS/MS) method for detecting dinitolmide residue and its metabolite (3‐amino‐2‐methyl‐5‐nitrobenzamide, 3‐ANOT) in eggs was developed and optimized. The samples were extracted using ASE with acetonitrile as the extractant and were purified by passage through a neutral alumina solid‐phase extraction column. Then, the samples were analyzed using the GC‐MS/MS method. The optimized method parameters were validated according to the requirements set forth by the European Union and the Food and Drug Administration. The average recoveries of dinitolmide and 3‐ANOT from eggs (egg white, egg yolk, and whole egg) at the limit of quantification (LOQ), 0.5 maximum residue limit (MRL), 1 MRL, and 2 MRL were 82.74% to 87.49%, the relative standard deviations (RSDs) were less than 4.63%, and the intra‐day RSDs and the inter‐day RSDs were 2.96% to 5.21% and 3.94% to 6.34%, respectively. The limits of detection and the LOQ were 0.8 to 2.8 μg/kg and 3.0 to 10.0 μg/kg, respectively. The decision limits (CCα) were 3001.69 to 3006.48 μg/kg, and the detection capabilities (CCβ) were 3001.74 to 3005.22 μg/kg. Finally, the new method was successfully applied to the quantitative determination of dinitolmide and 3‐ANOT in 50 commercial eggs from local supermarkets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A novel confirmatory analysis method to simultaneously extract, clean-up and detect dinitolmide and its metabolite (3-amino-2-methyl-5-nitrobenzamide, 3-ANOT) in chicken tissues using accelerated solvent extraction (ASE) with a neutral alumina solid-phase extraction (SPE) column coupled with gas chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry (ASE-SPE-GC–MS/MS) was established. GC–MS/MS was performed using a VF-5ht capillary column with helium as the carrier gas, temperature programming, and an inlet temperature of 340 °C. The experimental method was carried out in the electron ionization mode; the full scan mode was used for qualitative analysis, and selective reaction monitoring, combined with an external standard method was used for quantitation. Under the optimized conditions, at the addition levels of the limits of quantitation (LOQs), 0.5 MRL (maximum residue limit), 1 MRL and 2 MRL, the average recoveries of dinitolmide and 3-ANOT in chicken tissues were 81.96–94.31%, and the relative standard deviations (RSDs) were 1.72–5.37%. The limits of detection (LODs) (S/N ≥ 3) of dinitolmide and 3-ANOT in chicken tissues were 0.8–2.5 μg/kg, and the LOQs (S/N ≥ 10) were 2.7–8.0 μg/kg. The method validation parameters met the Chinese Ministry of Agriculture, European Union and United States Food and Drug Administration veterinary drug residue detection requirements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Untargeted metabolomics profiles metabolites of Salmonella enteritidis in chicken. • OPLS regression models identify 30 potential metabolite biomarkers. • Targeted metabolomics confirmed five biomarkers for Salmonella enteritidis. Salmonella Enteritidis easily contaminate chicken during slaughtering, processing, transportation, and sales, which seriously endangers human health. This study aimed to identify metabolite biomarkers for Salmonella Enteritidis contamination in chicken meat. UPLC-Q-Orbitrap MS untargeted metabolomics analysis identified 441 and 240 confidently metabolites in positive and negative ion mode, respectively. Thirty metabolites were defined as potential biomarkers for Salmonella enteritidis contamination in chicken meat. UPLC-QQQ-MS based targeted metabolomics was used to quantitatively analyze candidate metabolite biomarkers in Salmonella enteritidis contaminated and fresh chicken samples. A total of 10 candidate metabolite biomarkers were confirmed in the validation set, among which acetylcholine, l -Methionine, l -Proline, l -Valine, and l -Norleucine were identified as biomarkers for Salmonella Enteritidis contamination in chicken. The combined receiver operating characteristic curve analysis of the five biomarkers achieved an AUC of 0.956, indicating their high sensitivity and specificity in predicting Salmonella Enteritidis in raw chicken. In conclusion, the present study identified five metabolite biomarkers for Salmonella enteritidis in raw chicken. These results provide a potential theoretical basis for developing Salmonella Enteritidis detection methods in raw chicken. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A high-performance liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry (HPLC-MS/MS) method and an ultraperformance liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry (UPLC-MS/MS) method for determining eight coccidiostat (halofuginone, lasalocid, maduramicin, monensin, narasin, nigericin, robenidine and salinomycin) residues in beef were developed and compared. Samples were extracted with a mixture of acetic acid, acetonitrile and ethyl acetate and were then purified on a C 18 solid-phase extraction (SPE) column. The purified samples were analyzed by HPLC-MS/MS and UPLC-MS/MS, using 0.1% formic acid-water solution (A) and pure methanol (B) as the mobile phase. The samples were fractionated on a C 18 column using different gradient elution procedures, followed by qualitative analysis using a mass spectrometer operated in multiple reaction monitoring (MRM) mode with positive electrospray ionization; the external standard method was used for quantitation. At spiked levels that ranged from the limit of quantification (LOQ) to 100 μg/kg, the average recoveries were 71.96%–100.32% and 71.24%–89.24%, with relative standard deviations (RSDs) of 2.65%–12.38% and 2.98%–14.86% for UPLC-MS/MS and HPLC-MS/MS, respectively. The limits of detection (LODs) and LOQs of the eight coccidiostats were 0.14–0.32 μg/kg and 0.43–1.21 μg/kg, respectively, for UPLC-MS/MS analysis and 0.16–0.58 μg/kg and 0.53–1.92 μg/kg, respectively, for HPLC-MS/MS analysis. Both methods had good accuracy and precision, but UPLC-MS/MS had higher sensitivity than HPLC-MS/MS. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper describes a novel method that combines acetic anhydride derivatization with gas chromatography–electron ionization tandem mass spectrometry (GC–EI/MS/MS) for the sensitive and selective determination of piperazine in chicken and pig tissues. Samples were extracted using an accelerated solvent extraction (ASE) apparatus, purified by solid-phase extraction (SPE) and derivatized with acetic anhydride. This optimized method was validated according to the requirements defined by the European Union and the Food and Drug Administration. At the limit of quantification (LOQ) spiked levels of 50.0, 100.0, 500.0, 1000.0 and 2000.0 μg/kg, the average recoveries of piperazine in chicken and pig tissues were 77.46–96.26%, with relative standard deviations (RSDs) of 1.55–6.64%. The intra-day RSDs were 1.39–5.92%, and the inter-day RSDs were 2.24–8.39%. The limits of detection (LODs) and the LOQs were 1.4–1.6 μg/kg and 4.8–5.2 μg/kg, respectively. The decision limits (CC α ) were 102.02–105.17 μg/kg, and the detection capabilities (CC β ) were 104.03–109.09 μg/kg. Finally, the new approach was verified for the quantitative determination of piperazine in 30 commercial chicken and pig tissues from local supermarkets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The regulation of skeletal muscle growth and development in chicken is complex. MicroRNAs (miRNAs) have been found to play an important role in the process, and more research is needed to further understand the regulatory mechanism of miRNAs. In this study, leg muscles of Jinghai yellow chickens at 300 d with low body weight (slow-growing group) and high body weight (fast-growing group) were collected for miRNA sequencing (miRNA-seq) and Bioinformatics analysis revealed 12 differentially expressed miRNAs (DEMs) between the two groups. We predicted 150 target genes for the DEMs, and GO and KEGG pathway analysis showed the target genes of miR-24-3p and novel_miR_133 were most enriched in the terms related to growth and development. Moreover, networks of DEMs and target genes showed that miR-24-3p and novel_miR_133 were the 2 core miRNAs. Hence, miR-24-3p was selected for further functional exploration in chicken primary myoblasts (CPMs) with molecular biology technologies including qPCR, cell counting kit-8 (CCK-8), 5-ethynyl-2'-deoxyuridine (EdU) and immunofluorescence. When proliferating CPMs were transfected with miR-24-3p mimic, the expression of cyclin dependent kinase inhibitor 1A (P21) was up-regulated and both CCK-8 and EdU assays showed that the proliferation of CPMs was inhibited. However, when the inhibitor was transfected into the proliferating CPMs, the opposite results were found. In differentiated CPMs, transfection with miR-24-3p mimic resulted in up regulation of MYOD, MYOG and MYHC after 48 h. Myotube areas also increased significantly compared to the mimic negative control (NC) group. When treated with inhibitor, differentiation CPMs produced the opposite effects. Overall, we revealed 2 miRNAs (novel_miR_133 and miR-24-3p) significantly related with growth and development and further proved that miR-24-3p could suppress the proliferation and promote differentiation of CPMs. The results would facilitate understanding the effects of miRNAs on the growth and development of chickens at the post-transcriptional level and could also have an important guiding role in yellow-feathered chicken breeding. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Entity matching (EM) aims to identify whether two records refer to the same underlying real-world entity. Traditional entity matching methods mainly focus on structured data, where the attribute values are short and atomic. Recently, there has been an increasing demand for matching textual records, such as matching descriptions of products that correspond to long spans of text, which challenges the applications of these methods. Although a few deep learning (DL) solutions have been proposed, these solutions tend to "directly" use the DL techniques and treat the EM as NLP tasks without determining the unique demand for the EM task. Thus, the performance of these DL-based solutions is still far from satisfactory. In this paper, we present JointMatcher , a novel EM method based on the pre-trained Transformer-based language models so that the generated features of the textual records contain the context information. We realize that more attention paid to the similar segments and number-contained segments of the record pair is crucial for accurate matching. To integrate the high-contextualized features with the consideration of paying more attention to the similar segments and the number-contained segments, JointMatcher is equipped with the relevance-aware encoder and the numerically-aware encoder. Extensive experiments using structured and real-world textual datasets demonstrated that JointMatcher outperforms the previous state-of-the-art (SOTA) results without injecting any domain knowledge when small or medium size training sets are used. • The pitfalls overlooked by existing pre-trained LM-based EM methods are identified. • A novel pre-trained LM-based EM model JointMatcher is developed. • Two encoders are proposed to pay more attention to the important segments of the input record pair. • Experimental results show JointMatcher achieves good performance under limited training data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

[Display omitted] • A GC–MS/MS method was established for the determination of tilmicosin residue in poultry eggs. • The acetylation derivatization reaction of tilmicosin was established and optimized. • Liquid-liquid extraction combined with solid-phase extraction as sample pretreatment method was established and optimized. A novel GC-MS/MS analytical method was established for the qualitative and quantitative determination of tilmicosin in poultry (Jinghai yellow chicken, Gaoyou duck and Yangzhou goose) eggs. The method was based on LLE and SPE for sample extraction and purification. Pyridine and acetic anhydride were used for the derivatization reaction. When tilmicosin was added to blank poultry egg samples at the LOQ and 75 μg/kg, 150 μg/kg, and 300 μg/kg, the recoveries ranged from 72.80% to 88.75%, the intraday and interday RSDs ranged from 2.31% to 4.56% and 3.29%-5.61%, respectively, and the LODs and LOQs ranged from 3.8 to 5.6 μg/kg and 8.4-10.5 μg/kg, respectively. These results confirmed that the parameters of this novel method meet the requirements of the FAO & WHO (2014) for veterinary drug residue testing. Poultry egg samples purchased from the local market were analysed according to the established method and only one egg sample was found to contain 18.9 μg/kg of tilmicosin. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this present study, we developed a simple, rapid and specific method for the quantitative analysis of the contents of amoxicillin (AMO), AMO metabolites and ampicillin (AMP) in eggs. This method uses a simple liquid–liquid extraction with acetonitrile followed by liquid chromatography–tandem mass spectrometry (LC–MS/MS). The optimized method has been validated according to requirements defined by the European Union and Food and Drug Administration. Extraction recoveries of the target compounds from the egg at 5, 10 and 25 μg/kg were all higher than 80%, with relative standard deviations not exceeding 10.00%. The limits of quantification in eggs were below the maximum residue limits (MRLs). The decision limits (CC α ) ranged between 11.1 and 11.5 μg/kg, while detection capabilities (CC β ) from 12.1 to 13.0 μg/kg. These values were very close to the corresponding MRLs. Finally, the new approach was successfully verified for the quantitative determination of these analytes in 40 commercial eggs from local supermarkets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Simultaneous determination of tetracycline, oxytetracycline, doxycycline, enrofloxacin and ciprofloxacin residues in chicken muscles by UPLC-FLD. • The fluorescence detector output signals were processed by dual-channel detection. • The sample pretreatment process was optimized. A sensitive, rapid and efficient ultra-performance liquid chromatography-fluorescence detection (UPLC-FLD) method was established for detecting tetracycline (TC), oxytetracycline (OTC), doxycycline (DOX), enrofloxacin (ENR) and ciprofloxacin (CIP) residues in chicken muscle. Moreover, the fluorescence detector output signals were processed by dual-channel detection. The samples were extracted with a mixture of acetonitrile and 0.1 M citric acid containing 100 mM magnesium chloride (1:1, V/V, adjusted the pH to 5.0 with ammonia) using liquid-liquid extraction (LLE) and purified by Oasis PRiME hydrophilic-lipophilic balance (HLB) solid-phase extraction (SPE) cartridges (60 mg/3 mL). The target compounds were separated on an ACQUITY UPLC BEH C 18 (100 mm × 2.1 mm, 1.7 μm) chromatographic column using a mobile phase composed of acetonitrile and 0.1 M malonic acid solution containing 50 mM magnesium chloride hexahydrate, and the pH was adjusted to 5.5 by adding ammonia. The limits of detection (LODs) and limits of quantification (LOQs) of the five target compounds in chicken muscle were 0.1–13.1 μg/kg and 0.4–39.4 μg/kg, respectively. The recoveries of the five target compounds in chicken muscles were above 87.33 % when the spiked concentrations were at the LOQ, 0.5 maximum residue limit (MRL), 1.0 MRL and 2.0 MRL. The intraday relative standard deviations (RSDs) were less than 4.91 %, and the interday RSDs were less than 5.13 %. Ultimately, this novel detection method was successfully applied to the quantitative analysis of TC, OTC, DOX, ENR and CIP in 20 commercial chicken samples from local supermarkets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To investigate the effect of different dietary energy and protein levels on meat performance and meat quality of Jinghai yellow chickens, 480 43-day old Jinghai yellow chickens with similar weight were randomly divided into four experimental groups; experimental group 1 (protein 15%, metabolic energy 9.95 MJ/kg), experimental group 2 (protein 16%, metabolic energy 10.95 MJ/kg), experimental group 3 (protein 17%, metabolic energy 12.65 MJ/kg) and experimental group 4 (protein 18%, metabolic energy 13.95 MJ/kg), respectively. All chickens were slaughtered at 112-day old. The breast and leg muscles of Jinghai yellow chickens were collected, to determine the slaughter performance, conventional meat quality and muscle chemical indicators. The results indicated that dressing-out percentage and eviscerated yield percentage in four experimental groups were above 87.27% and 67.00%, respectively; other slaughter performance indicators exhibited no significant differences among various groups (P > 0.05); breast muscle color of hens in experimental group 4 varied significantly from that in other three groups (P <0.05); leg muscle color of hens in experimental group 2 varied extremely significantly from that in other three groups (P <0.01); water-holding capacity of breast muscles of hens in experimental group 3 was significantly higher than that in experimental group 4 (P < 0.05); thiamine content of breast muscles of cocks in experimental group 3 was significantly higher than that in experimental group 2 (P < 0.05); however, other properties exhibited no significant differences among various groups (P>0.05). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How to determine the scale parameter and the cluster number are two important open issues of spectral clustering remained to be studied. In this paper, it is aimed to overcome these two problems. Firstly, we analyze the principle of spectral clustering from normalized cut. Secondly, on one hand, a weighted local scale was proposed to improve both the classification performance and robustness. On the other hand, we proposed an automatic cluster number estimation method from standpoint of Eigenvectors of its affinity matrix. Finally, a framework of robust and smart spectral clustering method was concluded; it is robust enough to deal with arbitrary distributed datasets and smart enough to estimate cluster number automatically. The proposed method was tested both on artificial datasets and UCI datasets, and experiments prove its availability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Growing evidence has demonstrated the emerging role of long non-coding RNA as competitive endogenous RNA (ceRNA) in regulating skeletal muscle development. However, the mechanism of ceRNA regulated by lncRNA in pigeon skeletal muscle development remains unclear. To reveal the function and regulatory mechanisms of lncRNA, we first analyzed the expression profiles of lncRNA, microRNA (miRNA), and mRNA during the development of pigeon skeletal muscle using high-throughput sequencing. We then constructed a lncRNA–miRNA–mRNA ceRNA network based on differentially expressed (DE) lncRNAs, miRNAs, and mRNAs according to the ceRNA hypothesis. Functional enrichment and short time-series expression miner (STEM) analysis were performed to explore the function of the ceRNA network. Hub lncRNA–miRNA–mRNA interactions were identified by connectivity degree and validated using dual-luciferase activity assay. The results showed that a total of 1625 DE lncRNAs, 11,311 DE mRNAs, and 573 DE miRNAs were identified. A ceRNA network containing 9120 lncRNA–miRNA–mRNA interactions was constructed. STEM analysis indicated that the function of the lncRNA-associated ceRNA network might be developmental specific. Functional enrichment analysis identified potential pathways regulating pigeon skeletal muscle development, such as cell cycle and MAPK signaling. Based on the connectivity degree, lncRNAs TCONS_00066712, TCONS_00026594, TCONS_00001557, TCONS_00001553, and TCONS_00003307 were identified as hub genes in the ceRNA network. lncRNA TCONS_00026594 might regulate the FSHD region gene 1 (FRG1)/ SRC proto-oncogene, non-receptor tyrosine kinase (SRC) by sponge adsorption of cli-miR-1a-3p to affect the development of pigeon skeletal muscle. Our findings provide a data basis for in-depth elucidation of the lncRNA-associated ceRNA mechanism underlying pigeon skeletal muscle development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Eggs were used to study the determination and depletion of amoxicillin (AMO) residues after oral dosing hens (25.0 mg kg–1, 50.0 mg kg–1body weight), once daily for five days. A reverse-phase high-performance liquid chromatography with fluorescence detection (RP-HPLC-FLD) method was developed to determine AMO residues in albumen, yolk and whole egg. By using pre-column derivatisation, an improved liquid–liquid extraction procedure was developed for sample preparation. AMO were extracted from eggs with acetonitrile. The extract solution was extracted using saturated methylene chloride. The supernatant was reacted with salicylaldehyde under acidic and heating conditions. Limits of detection (LODs) were 1.2 ng g–1and limits of quantification (LOQs) were 3.9 ng g–1for AMO. Recoveries of AMO from samples fortified at levels of 5.0–125.0 ng g–1ranged from 79.1% to 88.5% in albumen, 78.6–83.6% in yolk and 78.3–85.1% in whole egg, with coefficients of variation of ≤7.3%. The maximum concentrations of AMO in albumen, yolk and whole egg were found to occur at 1.5, 2.5, 1.5 days after withdrawal of medication respectively. AMO was not detectable in albumen at 7.5 days after final administration of AMO, at 10.5–11.5 days in yolk and 10.5 days in whole egg after administration of two oral doses. The method was applied during the residue study of AMO in order to formulate a reasonable withdrawal period to ensure food safety. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A sensitive and robust method is presented for the simultaneous determination of amoxicillin (AMO) and ampicillin (AMP) in eggs by reversed-phase high-performance liquid chromatography with fluorescence detection (RP-HPLC–FLD). This method used a simple liquid–liquid extraction of the samples with acetonitrile and dichloromethane as precipitation of proteins and extraction solvent. AMO and AMP reacted with salicylaldehyde to form fluorescent derivatives, which were then analyzed with RP-HPLC–FLD. Separation was carried out on an Athena C18 column with a mobile phase consisting of 0.01M potassium dihydrogen phosphate, adjusted to pH 5.5 by 2M potassium hydroxide and acetonitrile. The detector response was linear over the tested concentration range from 5.0 to 800 ng/mL for AMO and AMP. The recovery values ranged from 78.4 to 88.7% for AMO and from 77.6 to 82.0% for AMP. The limits of detection were 1.2 for AMO and 0.4 µg/kg for AMP. The limits of quantification were 3.9 for AMO and 1.5 µg/kg for AMP. The corresponding intra-day and inter-day variation (relative standard deviation) were found to be less than 9.6 and 14.8%, respectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Myostatin, or growth and differentiation factor 8, is a member of the transforming growth factor-β superfamily; it functions as a negative regulator of skeletal muscle development and growth in mammals. In this study, single nucleotide polymorphisms in the 5′ regulatory region and exon 1 of the myostatin gene were detected by PCR–SSCP in the Bian, Jinghai, Youxi, and Arbor Acre chickens, and the associations of the polymorphisms with reproduction traits were analyzed. Seven SNPs (A326G, C334G, C1346T, G1375A, A1473G, G1491A, and G2283A) were found in the myostatin gene. Association analysis showed that the G2283A were significantly associated with reproduction traits. Bian chickens of the GG genotype had a greater age at first egg than those of the GA and AA genotypes (P < 0.01). Correspondingly, Bian chickens of the GA and AA genotypes had larger egg number at 300 days than those of the GG genotype (P < 0.05 and P < 0.01, respectively). Bian chickens of the AA genotype had significantly higher body weight at 300 days than those of the GG genotype (P < 0.05). These results suggested that the myostatin gene may have certain effects on reproduction traits other than merely as a negative regulator of skeletal muscle development and growth in mammals previously reported. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Abstract: A specific, sensitive and widely applicable reversed-phase high-performance liquid chromatography with fluorescence detection (RP-HPLC-FLD) method was developed for the simultaneous determination of thiamphenicol (TAP), florfenicol (FF) and florfenicol amine (FFA) in eggs. Samples were extracted with ethyl acetate–acetonitrile–ammonium hydroxide (49:49:2, v/v), defatted with hexane, followed by RP-HPLC-FLD determination. Liquid chromatography was performed on a 5μm LiChrospher C18 column using a mobile phase composed of acetonitrile (A), 0.01M sodium dihydrogen phosphate containing 0.005M sodium dodecyl sulfate and 0.1% triethylamine, adjusted to pH 4.8 by 85% phosphoric acid (B) (A:B, 35:65 v/v), at a flow rate of 1.0mL/min. The fluorescence detector of HPLC was set at 224nm for excitation wavelength and 290nm for emission wavelength. Limits of detection (LODs) were 1.5μg/kg for TAP and FF, 0.5μg/kg for FFA in eggs; limits of quantitation (LOQs) were 5μg/kg for TAP and FF, 2μg/kg for FFA in eggs. Linear calibration curves were obtained over concentration ranges of 0.025–5.0μg/mL for TAP with determination coefficients of 0.9997, 0.01–10.0μg/mL for FF with determination coefficients of 0.9997 and 0.0025–2.50μg/mL for FFA with determination coefficients of 0.9998, respectively. The recovery values ranged from 86.4% to 93.8% for TAP, 87.4% to 92.3% for FF and from 89.0% to 95.2% for FFA. The corresponding intra-day and inter-day variation (relative standard deviation, R.S.D.) found to be less than 6.7% and 10.8%, respectively. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

In our research, single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) of exon regions of the myostatin gene were detected by PCR-SSCP in the Bian chicken and three reference chicken populations (Jinghai, Youxi, and Arbor Acre). Four novel SNPs (G2283A, C7552T, C7638T, and T7661A) were detected. The findings from the least square means showed that Bian chickens with EE and DE genotypes had significantly higher body weight, at 6-18 weeks of age, than those of the DD genotype ( P < 0.05). The results suggest that the mutation G2283A, detected in exon 1, has potential as a genetic marker for body weight traits in the Bian chicken. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An innovative, rapid and stable method for simultaneous determination of three tetracycline (oxytetracycline, tetracycline and doxycycline) and two fluoroquinolone (ciprofloxacin and enrofloxacin) residues in poultry eggs by ultra-high performance liquid chromatography–fluorescence detection (UPLC-FLD) was established and optimized. The samples were homogenized and extracted with acetonitrile/ultrapure water (90:10, v/v) and then purified by solid-phase extraction (SPE). LC separation was achieved on an ACQUITY UPLC BEH C18 column (1.7 µm, 2.1 mm × 100 mm), and the mobile phase was composed of acetonitrile and a 0.1 mol/L malonic acid solution containing 50 mmol/L magnesium chloride (the pH was adjusted to 5.5 with ammonia). When the five target drugs were spiked at the limit of quantification, 0.5 times the maximum residue limit (MRL), 1.0 MRL and 2.0 MRL, the recoveries were above 83.5% and the precision ranged from 1.99% to 6.24%. These figures of merit complied with the parameter validation regulations of the EU and U.S. FDA. The limits of detection and quantifications of the targets were 0.1–13.4 µg/kg and 0.3–40.1 µg/kg, respectively. The proposed method was easily extended to quantitative analyses of target drug residues in 85 egg samples, thus demonstrating its reliability and applicability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Simple Summary: The growth and development of skeletal muscle determine the meat production performance of pigeons and are regulated by complex gene networks. To explore the genes involved in regulating the growth and development of pigeon skeletal muscle, RNA sequencing (RNA−seq) was used to characterise gene expression profiles during the development and growth of pigeon breast muscle and identify differentially expressed genes (DEGs) among different stages. This study expanded the diversity of pigeon mRNA, and it was helpful to understand the role of mRNA in pigeon muscle development and growth. The mechanisms behind the gene expression and regulation that modulate the development and growth of pigeon skeletal muscle remain largely unknown. In this study, we performed gene expression analysis on skeletal muscle samples at different developmental and growth stages using RNA sequencing (RNA−Seq). The differentially expressed genes (DEGs) were identified using edgeR software. Weighted gene co−expression network analysis (WGCNA) was used to identify the gene modules related to the growth and development of pigeon skeletal muscle based on DEGs. A total of 11,311 DEGs were identified. WGCNA aggregated 11,311 DEGs into 12 modules. Black and brown modules were significantly correlated with the 1st and 10th day of skeletal muscle growth, while turquoise and cyan modules were significantly correlated with the 8th and 13th days of skeletal muscle embryonic development. Four mRNA−mRNA regulatory networks corresponding to the four significant modules were constructed and visualised using Cytoscape software. Twenty candidate mRNAs were identified based on their connectivity degrees in the networks, including Abca8b, TCONS−00004461, VWF, OGDH, TGIF1, DKK3, Gfpt1 and RFC5, etc. A KEGG pathway enrichment analysis showed that many pathways were related to the growth and development of pigeon skeletal muscle, including PI3K/AKT/mTOR, AMPK, FAK, and thyroid hormone pathways. Five differentially expressed genes (LAST2, MYPN, DKK3, B4GALT6 and OGDH) in the network were selected, and their expression patterns were quantified by qRT−PCR. The results were consistent with our sequencing results. These findings could enhance our understanding of the gene expression and regulation in the development and growth of pigeon muscle. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Concentrations of blood serum macromineral calcium, phosphorus, sodium, chlorine and potassium of 6 to 40 months old growing yaks were determined bi-monthly with Beckman Synchron CX System, and body weights were also recorded in a production year-round. The body weight of growing yaks showed a pattern of rapidly gaining more weight in warm seasons and gradually losing about one fifth of it in cold seasons except of the uncompleted weaned younger animals. In the harsh cold seasons, the serum P dropped to an abnormally low level, while the serum Ca was maintained in a relatively constant level, which implied that much more restored Ca may be released to blood stream from the animal''s skeleton to maintain the Ca in homeostasis during the prolonged deficiency of forage intake. Both of the serum levels of Ca and P peaked in September, correspondently, the greatest body weight gain occurred in the same month. Except serum level of K, all the serum levels of macrominerals studied have positive correlations with the living body weight of growing yaks(P <0.05). Providing supplements with macrominerals, especially P and Ca in cold seasons, are necessary for the growth of yaks and will be benefit local farmers in the improvement of the yak production performance. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Transparent oxyfluoride glass-ceramic materials are of significant interest for the production of new optoelectronic devices. In this paper we report measurements of the detailed spectroscopy of rare earth dopants in both an oxyfluoride transparent glass ceramic and its glass precursor. We show that several spectroscopically different sites exist for the rare earth even in the glass precursor material, where a significant amount of the rare earth is already coordinated with fluorine. In the glass-ceramic material, these glassy fluorine-coordinated sites are replaced with crystalline sites, but a significant fraction of the rare earth ions are still within the glass phase. The fraction of rare earth ion that is incorporated into the crystalline phase is estimated from the rare earth spectroscopy, and the role of the rare earth coordination in the precursor glass is discussed. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]