Since the feed cost is a major determinant of profitability in poultry industry, how to improve feed efficiency through genetic selection is an intriguing subject for breeders and producers. As a more suitable indicator assessing feed efficiency, residual feed intake (RFI) is defined as the difference between observed and expected feed intake based on maintenance and growth. However, the geneti...

Improving feed efficiency in dairy cattle could result in more profitable and environmentally sustainable dairy production through lowering feed costs and emissions from dairy farming. In addition, beef production based on dairy herds generates fewer greenhouse gas emissions per unit of meat output than beef production from suckler cow systems. Different scenarios were used to assess the profit...

A better understanding of the factors regulating feed efficiency and their potential as predictors of feed efficiency in cattle is needed. Therefore, the potential of three classes of traits, namely, feeding behavior characteristics: daily time at feeder (TF; min/day), time per meal (TM; min), meal size (MS; g DM), eating rate (ER; g DM/min), number of daily meals (NM) and daily visits to the f...

No genetic parameters for performance and feed efficiency traits are available for Irish performance-tested bulls. The objective of this study was to determine the phenotypic and genetic variation for feed intake, BW, ADG, and measures of feed efficiency including feed conversion ratio (FCR), relative growth rate, Kleiber ratio, residual BW gain (RG), and residual feed intake (RFI). Observation...

Data from a selection experiment for residual feed intake (RFI) were used to estimate genetic correlations between measures of efficiency and performance traits with juvenile IGF-I, and to demonstrate direct and correlated responses to selection. The heritability of IGF-I was 0.28 +/- 0.06 and genetic correlations of IGF-I with feed intake (0.26 +/- 0.17), backfat (0.52 +/- 0.11), and feed conv...

In this work two issues concerning the use of the Automatic-Gain-Control (AGC) gain level for detecting and estimating the Jammer-to-Noise (J/N) ratio of Radio-Frequency Interference (RFI) are investigated. In the presence of RFI the AGC will reduce the gain level to keep the rms noise level at the input to the Analogue-to-Digital Converter (ADC) at a set level. As this level has to be estimate...

Radio frequency interference (RFI) is increasingly affecting radio astronomy research. A few years ago, active research to investigate the possibility of observing in the presence of interference using RFI mitigation techniques was initiated. In this paper, I briefly discuss four RFI mitigation/excision projects. These projects are: (1) A technique to suppress double sideband amplitude modulate...

OBJECTIVE To study the differences in mortality between terlipressin and somatostatin treatments in cirrhotic patients with esophageal variceal bleeding (EVB) and renal functional impairment (RFI). METHODS The National Health Insurance Database, part of the Taiwan National Health Insurance Program, was used to enroll cirrhotic patients who had received endoscopic variceal ligation plus somato...

BACKGROUND There are still controversies about the therapeutic strategies and subsequent outcome in head and neck Merkel cell carcinoma. METHODS Clinicopathological data of 23 Merkel cell carcinomas, 93 cutaneous head and neck squamous cell carcinomas (HNSCCs), 126 malignant melanomas, and 91 primary parotid gland carcinomas were comprehensively analyzed. Merkel cell carcinomas were cytokerat...

Variation in residual feed intake, that is, variation in feed intake in relation to liveweight (LW) and growth rate, was investigated using data from 540 progeny of 154 British Hereford sires, collected over ten 200-day postweaning performance tests conducted between 1979 and 1988. Residual feed intake (RFI ) was calculated for each test as the difference between Reg actual feed and expected fe...