We characterized the prevalence, antibiotic susceptibility profiles, and genotypes of Staphylococcus aureus among US meat and poultry samples (n = 136). S. aureus contaminated 47% of samples, and multidrug resistance was common among isolates (52%). S. aureus genotypes and resistance profiles differed significantly among sample types, suggesting food animal-specific contamination.

Human and animal diet reconstruction studies that rely on tissue chemical signatures aim at providing estimates on the relative intake of potential food groups. However, several sources of uncertainty need to be considered when handling data. Bayesian mixing models provide a natural platform to handle diverse sources of uncertainty while allowing the user to contribute with prior expert informa...

The rapid rise in the number of processing plants that utilize corn to produce ethanol has increased the availability of co-product feeds. Feedstuffs produced from the ethanol industry have now become mainstream commodities, particularly in the beef industry. For various reasons, however, the sheep industry has been slower to incorporate these feedstuffs. One reason is that information on feedi...

Feed intake is the major factor that influences both the body weight gain and feed efficiency in meat-type poultry. Because so many factors can influence feed intake, it is often difficult to correct a problem of poor feed intake unless a complete review of feed and management practices is made. Management and flock health issues are usually more likely to reduce feed intake than dietary factor...

We study in this paper the feed-through pin assignment problem for cell based design that assigns global nets to feed-through cells or implicit feed-through ports. On a single row, for a restricted permutation of global nets, we develop a graph theoretic approach for optimally minimizing the density of the channel above (below) the row subject to the bound on the density of the channel below (a...

In this chapter we study two naturally occurring feed-forward loops that are involved in galactose metabolism and transport. Despite having network structures that are capable of a producing dynamic, temporally diverse responses we find, by measuring dynamic noise correlations, that in their natural context these feed-forward loops are inactive. By perturbing genetic conditions the activity can...

Research on demand-responsive collective transportation facilities that can act as feeder services to time-table based public transportation (PT) requires detailed and accurate information about the PT infrastructure, including the attachment of bus stops to the appropriate network link. Due to the size of the infrastructure, the data integration shall be automated. This paper describes the eff...

An artificial neural network (ANN) modeling of gas drying by adsorption in fixed bed of composite materials is presented in this paper. The experimental investigations were carried out at two values of relative humidity and three values of air flow rate respectively. The experimental data were employed in the design of the feed forward neural networks for modeling the evolution in time of some ...