BACKGROUND Several approaches can be used to functionalize biomaterials, such as hydrogels, for biomedical applications. One of the molecules often used to improve cells adhesion is the peptide Arg-Gly-Asp (RGD). The RGD sequence, present in several proteins from the extra-cellular matrix (ECM), is a ligand for integrin-mediated cell adhesion; this sequence was recognized as a major functional ...

OBJECTIVE This study was conducted to evaluate the effects of dietary protein sources (soybean meal, SBM; low-gossypol cottonseed meal, LCSM; double-zero rapeseed meal, DRM) on laying performance, egg quality, and plasma parameters of laying hens. METHODS A total of 432 32-wk-old laying hens were randomly divided into 6 treatments with 6 replicates of 12 birds each. The birds were fed diets c...

In this research we employ data envelopment analysis (DEA) to measure the Malmquist productivity of semiconductor packaging and testing firms in Taiwan from 2000 to 2003. Malmquist productivity has three components: the measurement of technical change, the measurement of the frontier forward shift, and the measurement of the frontier backward shift of a company over two consecutive periods. Thi...

This paper describes a novel GMM-based bandwidth extension (BWE) method based on a sub-band basis spectrum model (SBM), in which each dimensional component represents a specific acoustic space in the frequency domain. The proposed method can achieve the BWE from a speech data with an arbitrary frequency bandwidth while the conventional methods perform the conversion from a fixed narrowband data...

gestibility or protein quality of SBM, the urease assay is good for detecting underprocessing and the KOH protein solubility assay is good for detecting overprocessing. A combination of the latter two assays is needed to ensure that SBM has neither been underheated nor overheated. The protein dispersibility index (PDI) assay may be superior to the urease and KOH assays as an indicator of minimu...

The objective of this experiment was to compare the nutritional properties of potato protein concentrate, a by-product of the starch industry produced entirely in Europe, with that of soybean meal (SBM), for growing cattle. The experiment was conducted on double-muscled Belgian Blue bulls, fitted with rumen, duodenal and ileal cannulas, according to a 4 × 4 Latin square design. They were fed th...

Lemna protein concentrate (LPC; 68.0% CP) is produced by extracting protein from de-oiled and dehydrated biomaterials from plants of the Lemnaceae family and may be used as a protein source for animals. There are, however, no published data on the nutritional value of LPC fed to pigs. Three experiments were, therefore, conducted to determine the concentration of ME, the standardized total tract...

Neurodevelopmental disorders such as spina bifida meningomyelocele (SBM) are often associated with dysrhythmic movement. We studied rhythm discrimination in 21 children with SBM and in 21 age-matched controls, with the research question being whether both groups showed a strong-meter advantage whereby rhythm discrimination is better for rhythms with a strong-meter, in which onsets of longer int...

Forty-two individually housed entire male pigs weighing 37.5 ± 0.15 kg (mean ± SEM) were used in a randomized block design having 7 dietary treatments (n = 6). The dietary treatments were 5 semisynthetic diets containing 350 g/kg of soybean (Glycine max) meal (SBM) with variable heat treatments (0, 7, 14, 21, and 28 min autoclaved at 135°C), a protein free (N-free) diet, and an enzymatically hy...

Two experiments were conducted to determine apparent ileal digestibility (AID) and standardized (SID) ileal digestibility of AA (Exp. 1) and the concentration of DE and ME (Exp. 2) in copra meal (CM), palm kernel expellers from Indonesia (PKE-IN), palm kernel expellers from Costa Rica (PKE-CR), palm kernel meal from Costa Rica (PKM), and soybean meal (SBM). In Exp. 1, 6 barrows (BW = 34.0 ± 1.4...