Mice are social animals hence group-housing of mice is preferred over individual housing. However, aggression in group-housed male mice under laboratory housing conditions is a well-known problem ...leading to serious health issues, including injury or death. Therefore, group-housed mice are frequently separated for welfare reasons. In this study, we investigated the effect of 3 different handling methods (tail, forceps, tube) in 2 different housing conditions (single vs. group) on the variance of aggression-associated parameters in male C57BL/6NCrl mice over 8 weeks. Blood glucose concentration, body weight, body temperature, plus number and severity of bite wounds and barbering intensity in group-housed mice were recorded. An assessment of nest complexity was also performed weekly. Feces were collected in week 3 and 7 for analysis of corticosterone metabolites. We also monitored the level of aggression by recording the behavior of group-housed animals after weekly cage cleaning. An open field test followed by a social novel object test, a light/dark box test, a hotplate and a resident-intruder test were performed at the end of the 8-week handling period. Post-mortem, we assessed organ weights. We found that forceps-handled mice, independent of the housing condition, had significantly higher levels of stress-induced-hyperthermia and enhanced aggression after cage cleaning, and they performed worse in the nest complexity test. In addition, handling male mice by the tail seems to be most effective to reduce aggressiveness after transferring animals into new cages, thereby representing an appropriate refinement.
Celotno besedilo
Dostopno za:
DOBA, IZUM, KILJ, NUK, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, SIK, UILJ, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK
We study the soft and collinear contributions to inclusive Higgs-boson production in gluon-gluon fusion at four loops. Using recent progress for the quark and gluon form factors and Mellin moments of ...splitting functions, we are able to complete the soft-gluon enhanced contributions exactly in the limit of a large number of colours, and to a sufficiently accurate numerical accuracy for QCD. The four-loop soft and virtual contributions increase the QCD cross section at 14 TeV by 2.7% and 0.2% for the standard choices μR=mH and μR=mH/2 of the renormalization scale, and reduce the scale uncertainty to below ±3%. As by-products, we derive the complete δ(1−x) term for the gluon-gluon splitting function at four loops and its purely Abelian contributions at five loops, and provide a numerical result for the single pole of the four-loop gluon form factor in dimensional regularization. Finally we present the closely related fourth-order coefficients D4 for the soft-gluon exponentiation of Higgs-boson and Drell-Yan lepton-pair production.
To better understand the contribution of wildlife to the dissemination of Salmonella and antimicrobial resistance in Salmonella and Escherichia coli, we examined whole-genome sequence data from ...Salmonella and E. coli isolates collected from raccoons (Procyon lotor) and environmental sources on farms in southern Ontario. All Salmonella and phenotypically resistant E. coli collected from raccoons, soil, and manure pits on five swine farms as part of a previous study were included. We assessed for evidence of potential transmission of these organisms between different sources and farms utilizing a combination of population structure assessments (using core-genome multi-locus sequence typing), direct comparisons of multi-drug resistant isolates, and epidemiological modeling of antimicrobial resistance (AMR) genes and plasmid incompatibility (Inc) types. Univariable logistic regression models were fit to assess the impact of source type, farm location, and sampling year on the occurrence of select resistance genes and Inc types. A total of 159 Salmonella and 96 resistant E. coli isolates were included. A diversity of Salmonella serovars and sequence types were identified, and, in some cases, we found similar or identical Salmonella isolates and resistance genes between raccoons, soil, and swine manure pits. Certain Inc types and resistance genes associated with source type were consistently more likely to be identified in isolates from raccoons than swine manure pits, suggesting that manure pits are not likely a primary source of those particular resistance determinants for raccoons. Overall, our data suggest that transmission of Salmonella and AMR determinants between raccoons and swine manure pits is uncommon, but soil-raccoon transmission appears to be occurring frequently. More comprehensive sampling of farms, and assessment of farms with other livestock species, as well as additional environmental sources (e.g., rivers) may help to further elucidate the movement of resistance genes between these various sources.
Celotno besedilo
Dostopno za:
DOBA, IZUM, KILJ, NUK, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, SIK, UILJ, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK
We analyze the iterative structure of unfactorized partonic structure functions in the large-x limit, and derive all-order expressions for the leading-logarithmic off-diagonal splitting functions Pgq ...and Pqg and the corresponding coefficient functions Cϕ,q and C2,g in Higgs- and gauge-boson exchange deep-inelastic scattering. The splitting functions are given in terms of a new function not encountered in perturbative QCD so far, and vanish maximally in the supersymmetric limit CA−CF→0. The coefficient functions do not vanish in this limit, and are given by simple expressions in terms of the above new function and the well-known leading-logarithmic threshold exponential. Our results also apply to the evolution of parton fragmentation functions and semi-inclusive e+e− annihilation.
Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) threatens the health of humans and animals and has repeatedly been detected in wild animal species across the world. This cross-sectional study integrates whole-genome ...sequence data from Escherichia coli isolates with demonstrated phenotypic resistance that originated from a previous longitudinal wildlife study in southern Ontario, as well as phenotypically resistant E. coli water isolates previously collected as part of a public health surveillance program. The objective of this work was to assess for evidence of possible transmission of antimicrobial resistance determinants between wild meso-mammals, swine manure pits, and environmental sources on a broad scale in the Grand River watershed, and at a local scale-for the subset of samples collected on both swine farms and conservation areas in the previous wildlife study. Logistic regression models were used to assess potential associations between sampling source, location type (swine farm vs. conservation area), and the occurrence of select resistance genes and predicted plasmids. In total, 200 isolates from the following sources were included: water (n = 20), wildlife (n = 73), swine manure pit (n = 31), soil (n = 73), and dumpsters (n = 3). Several genes and plasmid incompatibility types were significantly more likely to be identified on swine farms compared to conservation areas. Conversely, internationally distributed sequence types (e.g., ST131), extended-spectrum beta-lactamase- and AmpC-producing E. coli were isolated in lower prevalences (<10%) and were almost exclusively identified in water sources, or in raccoon and soil isolates obtained from conservation areas. Differences in the odds of detecting resistance genes and predicted plasmids among various sources and location types suggest different primary sources for individual AMR determinants, but, broadly, our findings suggest that raccoons, skunks and opossums in this region may be exposed to AMR pollution via water and agricultural sources, as well as anthropogenic sources in conservation areas.
Celotno besedilo
Dostopno za:
DOBA, IZUM, KILJ, NUK, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, SIK, UILJ, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK
We present PyWiFeS, a new Python-based data reduction pipeline for the Wide Field Spectrograph (WiFeS). PyWiFeS consists of a series of core data processing routines built on standard scientific ...Python packages commonly used in astronomical applications. Included in PyWiFeS is an implementation of a new global optical model of the spectrograph which provides wavelengths solutions accurate to ∼0.05 Å (RMS) across the entire detector. The core PyWiFeS package is designed to be scriptable to enable batch processing of large quantities of data, and we present a default format for handling of observation metadata and scripting of data reduction.
A
bstract
We have computed the five-loop corrections to the scale dependence of the renormalized coupling constant for Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD), its generalization to non-Abelian gauge theories ...with a simple compact Lie group, and for Quantum Electrodynamics (QED). Our analytical result, obtained using the background field method, infrared rearrangement via a new diagram-by-diagram implementation of the R
*
operation and the Forcer program for massless four-loop propagators, confirms the QCD and QED results obtained by only one group before. The numerical size of the five-loop corrections is briefly discussed in the standard
M
S
¯
scheme for QCD with
n
f
flavours and for pure SU(
N
) Yang-Mills theory. Their effect in QCD is much smaller than the four-loop contributions, even at rather low scales.
Utilizing recent three-loop results on the quark and gluon splitting functions and form factors, we derive the complete threshold-enhanced third-order (N
3LO) QCD corrections to the total cross ...sections for the production of lepton pairs and the Higgs boson in hadron collisions. These results, for the latter case obtained in the heavy top-quark limit, are employed to extend the threshold resummation for these processes to the fourth logarithmic order. We investigate the numerical impact of the higher-order corrections for Higgs boson production at the
Tevatron and the LHC. Our results, suitably treated in Mellin
N-space, provide a sufficiently accurate approximation to the full N
3LO contributions. Corrections of about 5% at the LHC and 10% at the
Tevatron are found for typical Higgs masses. The N
3LO predictions exhibit a considerably reduced dependence on the renormalization scale with, for the first time, stationary points close to the Higgs mass.
We present the next-to-next-to-leading order (NNLO) contributions to the main splitting functions for the evolution of longitudinally polarized parton densities of hadrons in perturbative QCD. The ...quark–quark and gluon–quark splitting functions have been obtained by extending our previous all Mellin-N calculations to the structure function g1 in electromagnetic deep-inelastic scattering (DIS). Their quark–gluon and gluon–gluon counterparts have been derived using third-order fixed-N calculations of structure functions in graviton-exchange DIS, relations to the unpolarized case and mathematical tools for systems of Diophantine equations. The NNLO corrections to the splitting functions are small outside the region of small momentum fractions x where they exhibit a large double-logarithmic enhancement, yet the corrections to the evolution of the parton densities can be unproblematic down to at least x≈10−4.
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