Genes in the TGF9 signaling pathway play important roles in the regulation of ovarian follicle growth and ovulation rate. Mutations in three genes in this pathway, growth differentiation factor 9 (GDF9), bone morphogenetic protein 15 (BMP15) and the bone morphogenetic protein receptor B 1 (BMPRB1), influence dizygotic (DZ) twinning rates in sheep. To date, only variants in GDF9 and BMP15, but n...

The objective of this study was to identify twinning rate quantitative trait loci (QTL) by typing pooled samples in a preliminary screening followed by interval mapping to test QTL effects. Four elite North American Holstein half-sib sire families with high twinning rate predicted transmitting abilities (PTA) were used in this study. Chromosomes 5, 7, 19 and 23 were not genotyped as these chrom...

BACKGROUND For a full understanding of the mechanical properties of a material, it is essential to understand the defect structures and associated properties and microhardness indentation is a technique that can aid this understanding. RESULTS The Vickers hardness on (010), {011} and {110} faces lay in the range of 304-363 MPa. The Knoop Hardnesses on the same faces lay in the range 314-482 M...

A new angular-dependent semi-empirical interatomic potential suitable for atomistic simulations of plastic deformation, fracture and related processes in body-centered cubic Ta has been constructed by fitting to experimental properties and a first-principles database generated in this work. The potential reasonably reproduces a variety of properties of Ta, including elastic constants, thermal e...

The effect of cold rolling on the microstructure and mechanical properties of an Al- and C-containing CoCrFeNiMn-type high-entropy alloy was reported. The alloy with a chemical composition (at %) of (20-23) Co, Cr, Fe, and Ni; 8.82 Mn; 3.37 Al; and 0.69 C was produced by self-propagating high-temperature synthesis with subsequent induction. In the initial as-cast condition the alloy had an face...

The microstructure and texture evolution of a commercially pure titanium sheet during cold-rolling is investigated in detail by X-ray diffraction and by orientation imaging in the FEG-SEM and in the TEM. The experimental data are compared with simulation results obtained by a viscoplastic self-consistent model. The aim of this work is to provide with a detailed description of the fine scale def...

A density functional theory–phase field dislocation dynamics model is used to study stress-induced emission of defects from grain boundaries in nanoscale face-centered cubic (fcc) crystals under ambient conditions. The propensity for stable stacking fault formation and the maximum grain size DSF below which a stacking fault is stable are found to scale inversely with the normalized intrinsic st...

The plastic co-deformation behavior at the homophase interfaces between the hard nanotwinned grain inclusions and the soft recrystallized matrix grains in a duplex-microstructured AISI 316L austenitic stainless steel is examined through the analysis of long-range orientation gradients within the matrix grains by electron backscatter diffraction and transmission electron microcopy. Our analysis ...

A total number of 1243 records of calving cases of 585 dairy Friesian cows during 8 consecutive years from 1997 to 2004 collected from Sakha Animal Production Research Station belonging to Animal Production Research Institute, Agriculture Research Center were used to study the effect of sire, live body weight (LBW) and age of dam and calving season on twinning rate and its consequent effects on...

In this STIR we proposed to investigate the microstructure and alloy composition on the formation and stability of nanotwinned microstructures. The long-term alloy design strategy focuses on microalloying additions to 1) reduce the stacking fault energy (SFE), enhance twinning formation, and increase twin volume fraction; 2) reduce the twin size via increasing interstitial content while also ta...