Eight reproductive rams with no prior reproductive disease were distributed into three groups of infection with T. gondii: GI, 3 rams, 2.0 x 10(5) P strain oocysts; GII, 3 rams, 1.0 x 10(6) RH strain tachyzoites; GIII, 2 control rams. Clinical parameters were measured and serological evaluations (IIF) were performed. Presence of the parasite in the semen was investigated by PCR and bioassay tec...

A total of 130 ram lambs were used in a study to determine the effects of sex alteration on serum hormone levels, growth rate and carcass traits. Sex alteration included no treatment (intact rams), scrotal ablation to alter normal testicular secretion (short scrotum rams) and castration to completely remove influences derived from the testes (wethers). Although these data suggest that scrotal a...

Mating behavior is known to be heritable in several species, but it is not known if selection schemes for ewe reproductive traits affect mating behavior of rams. Therefore, our objectives were to determine if divergent (high vs low index) selection of a female reproductive trait (lambs born divided by age of ewe minus one) affects mating behavior patterns of male offspring during training to se...

Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) are used to embed a circuit designed by users instantly. Most of FPGAs have Configurable Logic Blocks (CLBs) to implement combinational and sequential circuits and block RAMs to implement Random Access Memories (RAMs) and Read Only Memories (ROMs). Circuit design that minimizes the number of clock cycles is easy if we use asynchronous read operations. Howe...

BACKGROUND To describe Doppler optical coherence tomography (OCT) imaging of ruptured retinal arterial macroaneurysms (RAMs). METHODS Four eyes of four patients with ruptured RAMs were prospectively studied. Vascular imaging was obtained using swept-source Doppler OCT, and compared with indocyanine green angiography images. RESULTS En face projection of Doppler OCT images clearly showed RAM...

An experiment was conducted to determine whether exogenous estradiol-17beta (E2) could restore sexual behavior in castrated rams. The protocol consisted of three sequential 6-wk periods during which rams were studied while 1) intact, 2) bilaterally castrated, or 3) implanted s.c. with two 7.6-cm silastic implants each containing 309+/-16 mg of E2. Rams (classified as female-oriented [FOR, n = 7...

Cattle are noted carriers of the foodborne pathogen Salmonella enterica. The perceived need to decrease the potential human health risk posed by excretion of this pathogen has resulted in numerous studies examining the factors that influence Salmonella shedding in cattle. Fecal grab (FG) samples have been the predominant method used to identify cattle colonized or infected with Salmonella; howe...

Fecal culture for Escherichia coli O157:H7 was compared to rectoanal mucosal swab (RAMS) culture in dairy heifers over a 1-year period. RAMS enrichment culture was as sensitive as fecal culture using immunomagnetic separation (IMS) (P = 0.98, as determined by a chi-square test). RAMS culture is less costly than fecal IMS culture and can yield quantitative data.

In trial 1, Coastal bermudagrass pellets were fed for 63 d to 21 growing rams of Barbados Blackbelly (B), Dorset (D) and Blackbelly X Dorset (B X D) breeding to determine the effect of breed on voluntary intake (VI) and total gain. Initially, each breed group consisted of seven rams with mean weights of 18.6, 31.0 and 26.4 kg, respectively. At the end of the intake and growth phase, digestibili...

Testosterone-filled Silastic capsules were implanted into mature rams at the time of castration (wethers). After 6 weeks, a tonic pattern of FSH secretion was observed in rams, wethers and wethers implanted with testosterone. Castration caused serum concentrations of FSH to increase 4\p=n-\5-fold. Relatively low serum concentrations of testosterone (25\p=n-\50% of intact ram values) did not sig...