Quantification of Odours from Piggery Effluent Ponds using an Electronic Nose and an Artificial Neural Network

An Artificial Neural Network (ANN) and an electronic nose, AromaScan, were used to predict the piggery odour concentrations emanating from an effluent pond and to develop a confident, rapid, and cost-effective technique for odour measurement. Odour samples from five different piggery effluent ponds were analysed using the AromaScan and dynamic dilution olfactometry. The resulting sensor data were used to train the artificial neural network to correlate the responses to the odour concentrations measured by olfactometry. Effectiveness was evaluated through simulation with various pre-processing techniques and network architectures. The simulation results have shown that a two-layer back-propagation neural network, which has a tan-sigmoid transfer function in the hidden layer and a linear transfer function in the output layer, could be trained to predict piggery odour concentrations with high value of the correlation coefficient R of 0·984 under the best network performance. The results from the application of scaling and principal component analysis suggest that these techniques are necessary not only to avoid the failure of the network caused by saturation but also to enhance performance. An early stopping technique was shown to provide benefits to the network performance in terms of a decrease in computation time and overfitting. It was found that the optimal number of hidden neurons for the network was 20. Odour concentration of unknown samples were able to be predicted with significant accuracy.     

Molecular cloning of vitellogenin cDNA in rockfish (Sebastes schlegeli) and effects of estrogenic substances on its gene expression

In this study, we have cloned a partial cDNA of 620 bases encoding a vitellogenin gene of rockfish (rfVTG), Sebastes schlegeli. The expression levels of rfVTG mRNA increased 48 h after the 4-nonylphenol (NP) treatment (10 mg/kg BW) in both sexes. On the other hand, the mRNA levels of rfVTG increased 48 h in males and 12 h in females after injection when higher dose (25 mg/kg BW) of 4-NP was applied. It suggested that 4-NP induced VTG gene expression in both male and female immature rockfish. Therefore, the cloned rfVTG cDNA in this study can be used as a tool for monitoring endocrine disruptors in rockfish.     

Production and characterization of monoclonal antibodies detecting chicken interleukin-2 and the development of an antigen capture enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay

Eleven monoclonal antibodies (mAbs) which are specific for chicken interleukin-2 (chIL-2) were produced and characterized by enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA), Western blotting and neutralizing assays. These mAbs were used to develop a mAb-based antigen capture ELISA specific for chicken IL-2 detection. Anti-IL-2 mAbs bound specifically to E. coli-derived rchIL-2 in ELISA and identified a 16 kDa IL-2 polypeptide band in Western blot. Several mAbs were shown to neutralize the biological activities of both rchIL-2 and native chicken IL-2 as measured by concanavalin A (ConA)-induced lymphocyte proliferation assay, IL-2 bioassay, and natural killer cell assay. Among the neutralizing mAbs, the mAb chIL-2/11 was most potent in neutralizing IL-2 activity. To develop a sensitive ELISA for the detection of chicken IL-2, an antigen capture ELISA was developed using the mAb chIL-2/16 as the antigen capture antibody and rabbit anti-IL-2 peptide antibody as the detection antibody. Using the mAb-based antigen capture ELISA, significant correlation between the level of IL-2 detected in bioassays and in ELISA was observed. These results showed that the mAb-based antigen capture ELISA is less time-consuming and more reliable compared to a conventional IL-2 bioassay for chicken IL-2. These neutralizing mAbs will facilitate basic immunobiological studies of the role of IL-2 in normal and disease states in chickens.     

Zur Provenienz Kiefernsamens

Ohne Zusammenfassung     

Waldsamen-Erntebericht von Heinrich Keller Sohn in Darmstadt

Ohne Zusammenfassung     

Waldfamen-Ernte 1894/95

Ohne Zusammenfassung