The intake and digestibility of forages is largely influenced by the fibre content and specifically the neutral detergent fibre (NDF). Currently, the focus in commercial diet formulation and the modelling of animal performance is on the total NDF so as to achieve higher ruminant feed intakes, higher production performance and rumen health. Rations are often formulated for a specific level of ND...

Sixteen Holstein cows in midlactation were used in a 4 x 4 Latin square design to determine the effect of replacing alfalfa NDF with NDF from whole, linted cottonseed or dried distillers grains. Low and high fiber control diets (13 and 19% of dietary DM from alfalfa haylage NDF, respectively) were compared with diets designed to contain 13% of DM from alfalfa haylage NDF plus 6% of DM from eith...

Clinical and epidemiological researchers across all medical specialties need tools and knowledge representations to support the classification, aggregation, and analysis of medication data. The Veterans Affairs National Drug File Reference Terminology (NDF-RT) is a named standard for classifying medications. We describe our experience applying NDF-RT to aggregate RxNorm-encoded medications that...

BACKGROUND There is limited consensus among drug information sources on what constitutes drug-drug interactions (DDIs). We investigate DDI information in two publicly available sources, NDF-RT and DrugBank. METHODS We acquire drug-drug interactions from NDF-RT and DrugBank, and normalize the drugs to RxNorm. We compare interactions between NDF-RT and DrugBank and evaluate both sources against...

Neu differentiation factor (NDF/neuregulin) is widely expressed in the central and peripheral nervous systems, where it functions as a mediator of the interactions between nerve cells and Schwann, glia, oligodendrocyte, and muscle cells, to control cellular proliferation, differentiation, and migration. NDF binds to two receptor tyrosine kinases, ErbB-3 and ErbB-4. Here we demonstrate that NDF ...

Neu differentiation factor (NDF)-induced signaling involves the activation of members of the ErbB family of receptor tyrosine kinases. Although ectopic expression of recombinant ErbB receptors has yielded valuable insight into their signaling properties, the biological function and in vivo interplay of these receptors are still poorly understood. We addressed this issue by studying NDF signalin...

The National Drug File - Reference Terminology (NDF-RT) is a large and complex drug terminology. NDF-RT provides important information about clinical drugs, e.g., their chemical ingredients, mechanisms of action, dosage form and physiological effects. Within NDF-RT such information is represented using tens of thousands of roles. It is difficult to comprehend large, complex terminologies like N...

This study was conducted to investigate the effect of dextrose, starch, NDF, and a carbohydrate (CHO) mix on utilization of ruminal ammonia in dairy cows. Four ruminally and duodenally cannulated Holstein cows (BW = 788 +/- 31 kg; 217 +/- 35 d in milk) were allocated to four treatments in a 4 x 4 Latin square design trial. Cows were fed an all alfalfa diet at 12-h intervals (DMI = 22.2 +/- 0.25...

The objective of this study was to investigate the effect of NDF content in highly digestible grass/clover silage on particle size reduction, ruminal stratification, and selective retention in dairy heifers. The reduction in particle size from feed to feces was evaluated and related to feed intake, chewing activity, and apparent digestibility. Four grass/clover harvests (Mixtures of Lolium pere...

Dry matter intake (DMI) is related to dietary NDF content (Mertens, 1987) and in vitro NDF digestibility (NDFD, % of NDF; Oba and Allen, 1999). The NRC (2001) summative energy equation is based on fiber digestibility calculated using lignin. Whole-plant lignin content was found to have a strong negative relationship with in-vitro NDFD within comparisons of brown midrib (bm3) hybrids to isogenic...