As feed represents 60 to 70% of the cost of raising an animal to market weight, feed efficiency (the amount of dry weight intake to amount of wet weight gain) remains an important genetic trait in animal agriculture. To gain greater understanding of cellular mechanisms of feed efficiency (FE), shotgun proteomics was conducted using in-gel trypsin digestion and tandem mass spectrometry on breast...

Long-lived goal reasoning systems that reason over their history confront the bounding problem–the impracticality of reasoning over a large, ever-growing experience-base. This is a problem with some explanation systems that use the history of their observations to inform beliefs about the current state of the world. We propose to apply narrative intelligence (NI), which includes the ability to ...

A laser ablation-inductively coupled plasma-mass spectrometric (LA-ICPMS) technique utilizing a titanium-sapphire (TiS) femtosecond laser (fs-laser) has been developed for elemental and isotopic analysis. The signal intensity profile, depth of the ablation pit and level of elemental fractionation were investigated in order to evaluate the analytical capability of the present fs-laser ablation-I...

A deep structural investigation predominantly by X-ray spectroscopic techniques is conducted on films of copper hexacyanoferrate (CuHCF) deposited under different conditions, aimed at establishing structure-properties relationships. We show that the potentiodynamic electrosynthesis of CuHCF on carbon-based surfaces produces a highly disordered material, with a variable amount of Prussian Blue (...

Evolutionary relationships among strictly anaerobic dissimilatory Fe(III)-reducing bacteria obtained from a diversity of sedimentary environments were examined by phylogenetic analysis of 16S rRNA gene sequences. Members of the genera Geobacter, Desulfuromonas, Pelobacter, and Desulfuromusa formed a monophyletic group within the delta subdivision of the class Proteobacteria. On the basis of the...

Spin-polarized density functional theory (DFT) has been used to characterize hydrogen atom adsorption and diffusion energetics on the Fe(1 1 0) surface. The Kohn-Sham equations are solved with periodic boundary conditions and within the all-electron projector-augmented-wave (PAW) formalism, using a generalized gradient approximation (GGA) to account for electron exchange and correlation. We inv...

Carbon monoxide (CO) is commonly known as a toxic gas, yet both cultivation studies and emerging genome sequences of bacteria and archaea establish that CO is a widely utilized microbial growth substrate. In this study, we determined the prevalence of anaerobic carbon monoxide dehydrogenases ([Ni,Fe]-CODHs) in currently available genomic sequence databases. Currently, 185 out of 2887, or 6% of ...

High resolution spectra of 34 halo population dwarf and subgiant stars have been obtained with VLT/UVES and used to derive sulphur abundances from the λλ8694.0, 8694.6 and λλ9212.9, 9237.5 S i lines. In addition, iron abundances have been determined from 19 Fe ii lines and zinc abundances from the λλ4722.2, 4810.5 lines. The abundances are based on a classical 1D, LTE model atmosphere analysis,...

Oxidation and reduction kinetics of iron (Fe) and proportion of steady-state Fe(II) concentration relative to total dissolved Fe (steady-state Fe(II) fraction) were investigated in the presence of various types of standard humic substances (HS) with particular emphasis on the photochemical and thermal reduction of Fe(III) and oxidation of Fe(II) by dissolved oxygen (O2) and hydrogen peroxide (H...