As part of an approach to uncover the brain mechanisms underlying the regulation of energy balance in broiler chickens, we investigated the possible role of neuropeptide Y (NPY). The NPY gene expression was measured in the hypothalamus of birds from a standard Ross male line and a Ross relaxed line. Both lines are derived from the same founder stock, but the relaxed line has not been selected f...

The National Forest Soil Inventory (NFSI) provides the Greenhouse Gas Reporting in Germany with a quantitative assessment of organic carbon (C) stocks and changes in forest soils. Carbon stocks of the organic layer and the mineral topsoil (30 cm) were estimated on the basis of ca. 1.800 plots sampled from 1987 to 1992 and resampled from 2006 to 2008 on a nationwide grid of 8 × 8 km. Organic lay...

The effect of commercial selection on the growth, efficiency, and yield of broilers was studied using 2 University of Alberta Meat Control strains unselected since 1957 and 1978, and a commercial Ross 308 strain (2005). Mixed-sex chicks (n = 180 per strain) were placed into 4 replicate pens per strain, and grown on a current nutritional program to 56 d of age. Weekly front and side profile phot...

Some scientists consider the loss of the American chestnut from forests in the eastern United States as one of the greatest forest ecological disasters in the 20th century. The American Chestnut Foundation has been attempting to restore chestnut by backcrossing blight-resistant Chinese chestnut to American chestnut and selecting those strains with blight resistance. Third-generation backcross s...

Recent decades were characterized by genetic selection of broiler and layer chickens for enhanced growth rate and meat yield or intensified egg production, respectively. It is to be expected that genetic selection for various traits would also influence embryo development and growth patterns that affect metabolism. The objective of the present study was to examine the effects of broiler (Cobb a...

In this paper, a group of hybrid incremental learning algorithms for Bayesian network structures are proposed. The central idea of these hybrid algorithms is to use the polynomial-time constraint-based technique to build a candidate parent set for each domain variable, followed by the hill climbing search procedure to refine the current network structure under the guidance of the candidate pare...

The effect of hatch location and diet density on the prevalence of footpad dermatitis and growth performance in broiler chickens was studied. Broilers (Ross 308), incubated at 2 different hatch locations but originating from the same parent stock, were subjected to 2 feeding programs differing in energy content (2,750 vs. 2,950, 2,850 vs. 3,050, 2,900 vs. 3,100, and 2,900 vs. 3,100 kcal/kg for ...

Five experiments involving 3,100 settable eggs with living embryos of commercial broiler parent stock were conducted to determine the effect of ascorbic acid (AA) and cooling during egg incubation on embryonic weight, hatchability, percentage of cull chicks, embryonic mortality, and body weights of the hatched chicks. The treatments were carried out at 15, 15, 17, 11 and 19 d of incubation for ...

Two commercial broiler lines were used in an experiment to map quantitative trait loci (QTL) affecting disease resistance. Chickens from these lines were genotyped with 27 microsatellite markers to estimate heterozygosity and polymorphism information content (PIC), the probability that one parent is heterozygous at a marker locus and the other has a different genotype. Heterozygosity estimated ...

The aim of this study was to investigate the presence of antibodies to ALV-J in broilers and broiler breeders. For this, 5 broiler units and 1 broiler breeding unit in the Marmara region were visited. Seventy 4-6 -week-old chicks from the broiler units, consisting of 14 chicks from each broiler unit, were selected. Seventeen chickens from the broiler breeding unit were also selected. The chicks...