Genetic variances, heritabilities and maternal effects on body weight, breast meat yield, meat quality traits and the shape of the growth curve in turkey birds

Background

Turkey is an important agricultural species and is largely used as a meat bird. In 2004, turkey represented 6.5% of the world poultry meat production. The world-wide turkey population has rapidly grown due to increased commercial farming. Due to the high demand for turkey meat from both consumers and industry global turkey stocks increased from 100 million in 1970 to over 276 million in 2004. This rapidly increasing importance of turkeys was a reason to design this study for the estimation of genetic parameters that control body weight, body composition, meat quality traits and parameters that shape the growth curve in turkey birds.

Results

The average heritability estimate for body weight traits was 0.38, except for early weights that were strongly affected by maternal effects. This study showed that body weight traits, upper asymptote (a growth curve trait), percent breast meat and redness of meat had high heritability whereas heritabilities of breast length, breast width, percent drip loss, ultimate pH, lightness and yellowness of meat were medium to low. We found high positive genetic and phenotypic correlations between body weight, upper asymptote, most breast meat yield traits and percent drip loss but percent drip loss was found strongly negatively correlated with ultimate pH. Percent breast meat, however, showed genetic correlations close to zero with body weight traits and upper asymptote.

Conclusion

The results of this analysis and the growth curve from the studied population of turkey birds suggest that the turkey birds could be selected for breeding between 60 and 80 days of age in order to improve overall production and the production of desirable cuts of meat. The continuous selection of birds within this age range could promote high growth rates but specific attention to meat quality would be needed to avoid a negative impact on the quality of meat.     

Use of cervicovaginal fluid for the identification of biomarkers for pathologies of the female genital tract

Cervicovaginal fluid has an important function in the homeostasis and immunity of the lower female genital tract. Analysis of the cervicovaginal fluid proteome may therefore yield important information about the pathogenesis of numerous gynecological pathologies. Additionally, cervicovaginal fluid has great potential as a source of biomarkers for these conditions.     

Noisy: Identification of problematic columns in multiple sequence alignments

Motivation  

Sequence-based methods for phylogenetic reconstruction from (nucleic acid) sequence data are notoriously plagued by two effects: homoplasies and alignment errors. Large evolutionary distances imply a large number of homoplastic sites. As most protein-coding genes show dramatic variations in substitution rates that are not uncorrelated across the sequence, this often leads to a patchwork pattern of (i) phylogenetically informative and (ii) effectively randomized regions. In highly variable regions, furthermore, alignment errors accumulate resulting in sometimes misleading signals in phylogenetic reconstruction.     

Chitosan from Syncephalastrum racemosum used as a film support for lipase immobilization

Chitosan from a native Mucoralean strain, Syncephalastrum racemosum, isolated from herbivorous dung (Northeast-Brazil), was used as a film support for lipase immobilization. S. racemosum showed highest chitosan yield (152 mg g dry mycelia weight(-1); 15.2% of dry mycelia weight) among the nine strains screened, which presented 89% D-glucosamine. A chitosan film was used for lipase (EC 3.1.1.3) immobilization using glutaraldehyde as a bifunctional agent. The immobilized lipase retained 47% (12.6 micromol s(-1) m(-2)) of its initial catalytic activity after four cycles of reaction. This result is comparable (same order of magnitude) to that of the enzyme immobilized on film made from commercially available crustacean chitosan.