Terminalia Chebula Extract Replacing Zinc Oxide Enhances Antioxidant and Anti-Inflammatory Capabilities, Improves Growth Performance, and Promotes Intestinal Health in Weaned Piglets.

This study aimed to assess the effects of substituting zinc oxide with terminalia chebula extract (TCE) on growth performance, antioxidant capacity, immune function, and intestinal health in weaned pigs. Initially, 72 weaned Duroc × Landrace × Large White piglets, 28 days old with an initial weight of 7.43 ± 0.14 kg, equally divided by gender, were randomly assigned into three groups, with six replicates and four piglets per replicate. They were fed a basal diet (CON group), a diet containing 2 g/kg zinc oxide (ZnO group), or 2 g/kg TCE (TCE group) for a duration of 28 days. Subsequently, to further confirm the most appropriate levels of TCE in piglets, 96 piglets of the same breeds and age, with an initial weight of 7.42 ± 0.12 kg, also equally divided by gender, were randomly assigned into four groups, each with six replicates and four piglets per replicate, and fed a basal diet (CON group), or diets supplemented with 1 g/kg TCE (LTCE group), 2 g/kg TCE (MTCE group), or 4 g/kg TCE (HTCE group) for a duration of 28 days. The results demonstrated that both TCE and ZnO reduced diarrhea rates (p = 0.001) and enhanced average daily gain (ADG) (p = 0.014) compared to the control group. TCE at 1 g/kg and 4 g/kg reduced the feed to gain ratio (p = 0.050). Dietary supplementing with TCE and ZnO increased serum total antioxidant capacity (T-AOC) (p = 0.020). Various doses of TCE also increased jejunal IgA (p = 0.000) levels and IL-10 expression (p = 0.004), and decreased the levels of TNF-α in both serum (p = 0.043) and jejunal mucosa (p = 0.000). Notably, TCE reduced the crypt depth (CD) of the duodenal (p = 0.007) and increased the villus height (VH) of the ileal (p = 0.045), and with increased dosage, there was a rise in the villus height to crypt depth ratio (VH:CD) in the duodenum (p = 0.000) and jejunum (p = 0.001). Higher abundances of Lactobacillaceae (p = 0.000) and lower levels of Streptococcaceae (p = 0.000) and Peptostreptococcaceae (p = 0.035) in cecal contents were fed the ZnO and TCE pigs compared with CON pigs. Therefore, TCE was firstly presented as being able to replace zinc oxide, improve intestinal morphology, and enhance antioxidant and immune functions, thus safeguarding intestinal mucosal health and promoting piglet growth.

PSD-ELGAN: A pseudo self-distillation based CycleGAN with enhanced local adversarial interaction for single image dehazing.

Compared to pixel-level content loss, domain-level style loss in CycleGAN-based dehazing algorithms just imposes relatively soft constraints on the intermediate translated images, resulting in struggling to accurately model haze-free features from real hazy scenes. Furthermore, globally perceptual discriminator may misclassify real hazy images with significant scene depth variations as clean style, thereby resulting in severe haze residue. To address these issues, we propose a pseudo self-distillation based CycleGAN with enhanced local adversarial interaction for image dehazing, termed as PSD-ELGAN. On the one hand, we leverage the characteristic of CycleGAN to generate pseudo image pairs during training. Knowledge distillation is employed in this unsupervised framework to transfer the informative high-quality features from the self-reconstruction network of real clean images to the dehazing generator of paired pseudo hazy images, which effectively improves its haze-free feature representation ability without increasing network parameters. On the other hand, in the output of dehazing generator, four non-uniform image patches severely affected by residual haze are adaptively selected as input samples. The local discriminator could easily distinguish their hazy style, thereby further compelling the dehazing generator to suppress haze residues in such regions, thus enhancing its dehazing performance. Extensive experiments show that our PSD-ELGAN can achieve promising results and better generality across various datasets.

Research on multi-strategy improved sparrow search optimization algorithm.

To address the issues with inadequate search space, sluggish convergence and easy fall into local optimality during iteration of the sparrow search algorithm (SSA), a multi-strategy improved sparrow search algorithm (ISSA), is developed. First, the population dynamic adjustment strategy is carried out to restrict the amount of sparrow population discoverers and joiners. Second, the update strategy in the mining phase of the honeypot optimization algorithm (HBA) is combined to change the update formula of the joiner's position to enhance the global exploration ability of the algorithm. Finally, the optimal position of population discoverers is perturbed using the perturbation operator and levy flight strategy to improve the ability of the algorithm to jump out of local optimum. The experimental simulations are put up against the basic sparrow search algorithm and the other four swarm intelligence (SI) algorithms in 13 benchmark test functions, and the Wilcoxon rank sum test is used to determine whether the algorithm is significantly different from the other algorithms. The results show that the improved sparrow search algorithm has better convergence and solution accuracy, and the global optimization ability is greatly improved. When the proposed algorithm is used in pilot optimization in channel estimation, the bit error rate is greatly improved, which shows the superiority of the proposed algorithm in engineering application.

Identification of the novel HLA-A*68:100 allele by PCR-SBT in a Chinese bone marrow donor.

The novel HLA-A*68:100 allele differs from HLA-A*68:01:02:01 by one nucleotide substitution in exon 3 at position 371.

Characterization of the novel HLA-B*15:271 allele by sequencing-based typing in a Chinese bone marrow donor.

HLA-B*15:271 differs from HLA-B*15:25:01 by 1 nucleotide substitution at codon 197 in exon 4.