Chicken growth traits are important economic traits in broilers. A large number of studies are available on finding genetic factors affecting chicken growth. However, most of these studies identified chromosome regions containing putative quantitative trait loci and finding causal mutations is still a challenge. In this genome-wide association study (GWAS), we identified a narrow 1.5 Mb region (173.5–175 Mb) of chicken (Gallus gallus) chromosome (GGA) 1 to be strongly associated with chicken growth using 47,678 SNPs and 489 F2 chickens. The growth traits included aggregate body weight (BW) at 0–90 d of age measured weekly, biweekly average daily gains (ADG) derived from weekly body weight, and breast muscle weight (BMW), leg muscle weight (LMW) and wing weight (WW) at 90 d of age. Five SNPs in the 1.5 Mb KPNA3-FOXO1A region at GGA1 had the highest significant effects for all growth traits in this study, including a SNP at 8.9 Kb upstream of FOXO1A for BW at 22–48 d and 70 d, a SNP at 1.9 Kb downstream of FOXO1A for WW, a SNP at 20.9 Kb downstream of ENSGALG00000022732 for ADG at 29–42 d, a SNP in INTS6 for BW at 90 d, and a SNP in KPNA3 for BMW and LMW. The 1.5 Mb KPNA3-FOXO1A region contained two microRNA genes that could bind to messenger ribonucleic acid (mRNA) of IGF1, FOXO1A and KPNA3. It was further indicated that the 1.5 Mb GGA1 region had the strongest effects on chicken growth during 22–42 d.

Time-of-flight mass spectrometry (TOFMS) is coupled online with capillary electrophoresis (CE) to analyze mixtures of biomolecules using an electrospray ionization (ESI) interface. The eluent is electrosprayed directly from the CE capillary

Relaxed clock models enable estimation of molecular substitution rates across lineages and are widely used in phylogenetics for dating evolutionary divergence times. Under the (uncorrelated) relaxed clock model, tree branches are associated with molecular substitution rates which are independently and identically distributed. In this article we delved into the internal complexities of the relaxed clock model in order to develop efficient MCMC operators for Bayesian phylogenetic inference. We compared three substitution rate parameterisations, introduced an adaptive operator which learns the weights of other operators during MCMC, and we explored how relaxed clock model estimation can benefit from two cutting-edge proposal kernels: the AVMVN and Bactrian kernels. This work has produced an operator scheme that is up to 65 times more efficient at exploring continuous relaxed clock parameters compared with previous setups, depending on the dataset. Finally, we explored variants of the standard narrow exchange operator which are specifically designed for the relaxed clock model. In the most extreme case, this new operator traversed tree space 40% more efficiently than narrow exchange. The methodologies introduced are adaptive and highly effective on short as well as long alignments. The results are available via the open source optimised relaxed clock (ORC) package for BEAST 2 under a GNU licence (https://github.com/jordandouglas/ORC).

Birth asphyxia constitutes a major global public health burden for millions of infants, despite hypothermia therapy. There is a critical need for real time surrogate markers of therapeutic success, to aid in patient selection and/or modification of interventions in neonatal encephalopathy (NE). This is a proof of concept study aiming to quantify neurovascular coupling (NVC) using wavelet analysis of the dynamic coherence between amplitude-integrated electroencephalography (aEEG) and near-infrared spectroscopy in NE. NVC coupling is assessed by a wavelet metric estimation of percent time of coherence between NIRS SctO2 and aEEG for 78 hours after birth. An abnormal outcome was predefined by a Bayley III score <85 by 18–24 m. We observed high coherence, intact NVC, between the oscillations of SctO2 and aEEG in the frequency range of 0.00025–0.001 Hz in the non-encephalopathic newborns. NVC coherence was significantly decreased in encephalopathic newborns who were cooled vs. non-encephalopathic controls (median IQR 3[2–9] vs.36 [33–39]; p < 0.01), and was significantly lower in those with abnormal 24 months outcomes relative to those with normal outcomes (median IQR 2[1–3] vs 28[19–26], p = 0.04). Wavelet coherence analysis of neurovascular coupling in NE may identify infants at risk for abnormal outcomes.

Belt-like ZnS with visible photoluminescence was synthesized rapidly with Zn and S in the vapor phase.