By mid-August 1995, 55% of broiler embryos in North America were vaccinated for Marek’s disease using the INOVOJECT system, with 201 INOVOJECT machines placed with 16 of the top 25 poultry producers, providing the industry with the capacity to inject in excess of 400 million eggs per month or about 5 billion eggs per annum. In ovo administration of a bursal disease antibody-infectious bursal ...

Parasympathetic and sympathetic innervation of the embryonic chick heart proceed non-coordinately. beta-Adrenergic agonists mediate an increase in beating rate in embryonic chick heart prior to ingrowth of the vagus nerve (Culver, N. G., and Fishman, D. A. (1977) Am. J. Physiol. 232, R116-R123) while muscarinic agonists exert relatively little effect on beating rate in hearts 2-4 days in ovo (P...

For chickens, arginine considered an essential amino acid due to the lack of urea cycle in birds. Arginine deficiency causes growth retardation, higher prevalence of disease due to the malfunction of immune system, and lower gastrointestinal capacity. However, higher levels of arginine in the diet improved growth performance, muscle hypertrophy, and meat quality. Arginine reduces carcass fat ac...

Monoclonal antibodies to adult chicken myosin light chains were generated and used to quantitate the types of myosin light-chain (MLC) isoforms expressed during development of the pectoralis major (PM), anterior latissimus dorsi (ALD), and medial adductor (MA) muscles of the chicken. These are muscles which, in the adult, are composed predominantly of fast, slow, and a mixture of fiber types, r...

The objective of the present study was to evaluate the effects of insulin-like growth factor-1 (IGF-1) on the histological development of the thoracic part of the m. longus colli dorsalis (m. spinalis thoracis) in Japanese quail embryos. A single in ovo dose of recombinant human IGF-1 (rhIGF-1) (100 ng embryo) was administered through the blunt end of eggs via a single hole made with a dental d...

Order-value optimization (OVO) is a generalization of the minimax problem motivated by decision-making problems under uncertainty and by robust estimation. New optimality conditions for this nonsmooth optimization problem are derived. An equivalent mathematical programming problem with equilibrium constraints is deduced. The relation between OVO and this nonlinear-programming reformulation is s...

The chicken embryo has served as a classic model system for developmental studies due to its easy access for surgical manipulations and a wealth of data about chicken embryogenesis. Notably, the mechanisms controlling limb development have been explored best in the chick. Recently, the method of in ovo electroporation has been used successfully to transfect particular cells/tissues during embry...