Protective effects of the phytogenic feed additive "comfort" on growth performance via modulation of hypothalamic feeding- and drinking-related neuropeptides in cyclic heat-stressed broilers.

Identification of alternatives to antibiotics in livestock and poultry is necessary. Fueled by consumer preferences, phytogenic feed additives are increasingly used in the food system; however, their mode of action is not well defined. Here, we used broiler chickens, in which appetite and feeding behavior regulation are controlled by complex mechanisms, to determine the effect of the phytogenic feed additive "comfort" (PFA-C) as well as its underlying molecular mechanisms on growth performance in heat-stressed broiler chickens. Heat stress significantly increased birds' core body temperature, water intake, and the hypothalamic expression of heat shock protein (HSP) 70, whereas it decreased feed intake, BW, and woody breast incidence. Phytogenic feed additive "comfort" supplementation downregulated the hypothalamic expression of HSP70, reduced core body temperature, increased feed and water intake, and improved BW in HS broilers. At molecular levels, the effect of PFA-C on growth performance seemed to be mediated by modulation of hypothalamic expression of melanocortin receptor 2, arginine vasopressin, aquaporin 2, and sodium and potassium-transporting ATPase subunit beta 1 polypeptides. In summary, PFA-C supplementation ameliorates heat stress productivity losses via a potential cytoprotective effect, reduction of hypothalamic intracellular stress, and modulation of hypothalamic feeding- and drinking-related polypeptide expression.

Multiresolution feature detection using a family of isotropic bandpass filters.

Presents a novel method which uses a special type of multi-scale isotropic band-pass filters to detect image landmark and corner features. This paper mainly contributes to the solutions of the following problems: (1) defining a general family of feature detectors under a unified framework that are able to enhance and detect the desired features; (2) explaining theoretically and experimentally why these feature points can be detected by the proposed detectors; and (3) extending the detectors to multi-scale versions for jointly achieving good detectability and localization where an automatic scale selection method is applied. The paper then presents several applications for detecting landmarks and corners using the proposed methods, in order to illustrate their usage. These include detecting landmarks from gesture images (of the face and hand), from airborne and vehicle-borne IR landmine images, and from images containing object corners. Experiments have been performed using the proposed detectors to these applications. Some comparisons and evaluations have also been performed. The results have demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed detectors in terms of feature detectability and localization.