Publications by authors named "Andrew Macintosh"

Research into mosquito-borne illnesses faces hurdles because feeding fresh animal blood to rear female mosquitoes presents logistical, economic, and safety challenges. In this study, a shelf-stable additive (spray-dried porcine blood; SDPB) hypothesized to supply accessible hemoglobin was evaluated within an alternative meal (AM) containing whey powder and PBS for rearing the yellow fever mosquito . LC-MS/MS proteomics, microbial assays, and particle reduction techniques confirmed and characterized the functionality of hemoglobin in SDPB, while engorgement, fecundity, egg viability, and meal stability bioassays assessed AM performance.

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  • Disease outbreaks pose significant risks to great apes and wildlife, and understanding social networks is crucial for predicting how diseases spread among these populations.
  • The study focused on wild chimpanzees and explored how individual traits like sex and age influence their social connections and role in disease transmission.
  • Results revealed that older males are more socially central, which affects their likelihood of infection, especially for highly transmissible pathogens with longer infectious periods, emphasizing the need to consider social dynamics in disease outbreak research.
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  • Maternal behavior in primates shows significant variation and influences the behaviors of their immature offspring, but the extent of this impact is still not fully understood.
  • In a study of Japanese macaques, researchers found that juveniles with mothers who frequently rejected them were more likely to engage with peers, even when mothers were absent, indicating a lasting effect of maternal rejection.
  • Conversely, juveniles with more protective mothers tended to play less and interact less with others, but this influence seemed to diminish when the mother was not nearby, suggesting different dynamics between maternal rejection and protectiveness.
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  • - The study examines how colobus monkeys (Colobus vellerosus) adapt their behaviors regarding intergroup aggression as their population grows, focusing on who contributes to public goods like food defense and home range security.
  • - Both male and female monkeys engage in group encounters to defend food resources; however, females participate more as the competition increases, highlighting their role in home range defense.
  • - Despite females taking more initiative in defending social and resource stability, males still play a significant role in intergroup interactions, suggesting they might not be able to contribute more due to limited resources or time.
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  • Non-human primates (NHPs) are facing population declines due to various threats, including diseases caused by parasites, bacteria, and viruses.
  • Strongylid nematodes are common parasitic infections in NHPs, but their diversity is hard to study due to mixed infections not being distinguishable by traditional methods.
  • This study used advanced metagenomics techniques to analyze strongylid infections in NHPs from Malaysia and Japan, finding that the communities in Asian NHPs may be less diverse than those in African NHPs, providing key data for monitoring NHP health.
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  • The study explores how individual interactions shape complex societies, focusing on social networks formed by maximizing benefits and minimizing costs in relationships.
  • An agent-based model was created to show how individuals choose interactions based on social attraction to beneficial partners and avoidance of costly ones, leading to different types of network structures.
  • Findings indicate that avoiding highly costly individuals can lead to modular networks, while favoring interactions with highly beneficial partners can result in less modular networks, highlighting the importance of individual decision-making in social trade-offs.
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Belgian Saisons and Lambics are two well-known examples in the brewing industry of mixed fermentations, combination of two or more yeast and/or bacteria strains. The purpose of this study was to determine the impact different pitch rates of Saccharomyces cerevisiae (traditional brewing yeast) and S. cerevisiae var.

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Standard Palm Oil (SPO) is widely used as a food ingredient partially due to its unique thermophysical properties. However, the American Heart Association recommends a saturated fat consumption of <5% of the caloric intake per day. The Palm hybrid yields oil known as "palm oil with a higher content of oleic acid" (HOPO), with <35% SFA and >50% oleic acid.

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Although knowledge of the functions of the gut microbiome has increased greatly over the past few decades, our understanding of the mechanisms governing its ecology and evolution remains obscure. While host genetic distance is a strong predictor of the gut microbiome in large-scale studies and captive settings, its influence has not always been evident at finer taxonomic scales, especially when considering among the recently diverged animals in natural settings. Comparing the gut microbiome of 19 populations of Japanese macaques Macaca fuscata across the Japanese archipelago, we assessed the relative roles of host genetic distance, geographic distance and dietary factors in influencing the macaque gut microbiome.

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Cucurbita moschata, commonly known as squash or pumpkin, is a member of the Cucurbitaceae family originating from Central America. This species is regarded as heat tolerant and disease resistant and is commonly used in breeding programs. Calabaza (wintersquash) is an emerging market type of C.

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Alternatives to oils with high saturated fatty acid content are often liquid oils (high in unsaturated fatty acids) that have a modified structure created either through additives or processing. Emulsifiers are additives that can be used as structuring agents of liquid fats; this process results in products such as oleogels, which can broaden the applications of these oils. This study assessed and compared the effects of mono- and diglycerides at 3%, 5%, 7% and 10% / on the mechanical and thermal properties of high-oleic palm oil (HOPO) oleogels.

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  • Disgust is an evolved response aimed at reducing illness risk, linked to behaviors that help avoid parasites and toxins, but its role in wild animal disease avoidance is not well understood.
  • With rising human-wildlife conflicts, understanding disgust is crucial for developing effective conservation strategies, utilizing modern tools in animal ecology for testing behaviors across various species and environments.
  • The paper suggests five practical applications of disgust-related avoidance, emphasizes the need for comprehensive studies on disease and ecological interactions, discusses ethical considerations in research, and calls for a database to compile evidence on animal disease avoidance behaviors.
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Unlabelled: This research aimed to assess how the partial removal of carbon dioxide affects fermentations to provide a better understanding of how the manipulation of carbon dioxide concentration can be used to optimize industrial fermentations. To achieve this, fermentation kinetics, fermentation metabolic products, and yeast stress indicators were analyzed throughout ongoing brewing fermentations conducted under partial vacuum with atmospheric pressure controls. The partial vacuum reduced the solubility of carbon dioxide in the media and decreased the time necessary to reach carbon dioxide saturation.

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  • Female primates, especially mothers, play a crucial role in the social development of their offspring, but their parenting styles can vary significantly, particularly in terms of protectiveness and rejection.
  • This study observed two species of macaques with different dominance styles: the less tolerant Japanese macaques and the more tolerant moor macaques, to see how these styles influenced maternal behavior and offspring development.
  • Findings indicated that maternal behaviors, such as proximity and grooming, changed differently as the offspring matured, with distinct impacts on the offspring's independent interactions and play based on their mother's style of care.
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  • Environmental contamination, particularly in wetlands, significantly contributes to biodiversity loss, impacting species during critical development phases.
  • This study examined the effects of the herbicide nicosulfuron on spined toad tadpoles at various developmental stages, revealing that exposure led to larger size but altered body and tail muscle traits, increased activity, and changes in swimming speed and behavior.
  • Results indicated that higher concentrations of the herbicide correlated with more significant effects, and that the timing of exposure did not change the outcomes, highlighting the importance for regulators to address sublethal concentrations in environmental policies.
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  • Group living can benefit individuals, but it also increases the risk of pathogen transmission due to more social contacts that lead to higher parasite abundance.
  • The study focused on Japanese macaques to explore how social network centrality (connections and interactions) relates to gastrointestinal helminth infection intensity measured by egg counts in feces.
  • The results indicated that while network centrality correlated with infection intensity at the whole group level, this correlation weakened and lost statistical significance when only subsets of the group were analyzed, suggesting that excluding parts of the population affects overall findings.
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Quality characteristics of bakery products rely partially on the amount and type of fats in their formulation. This study focused on producing emulsified shortenings with high oleic palm oil fractions to be thermo-mechanically characterized and used in the baking of high-fat cookies. Palm oil and hydrogenated fats were commonly used in bakery shortenings to achieve texture and flavor.

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  • The study explores how bacterial infections influence social behaviors in fruit flies, focusing on factors like pathogen species, dose, genetic background, and sex.
  • Infected female flies showed reduced mean pairwise distance with each other, varying with the type of bacteria, while they did not avoid infected flies.
  • There were also notable differences in social aggregation based on sex, with infected females gathering more closely than males, indicating that infection not only affects behavior but also has implications for disease transmission depending on genetic and sex-related factors.
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Animal communication has long been thought to be subject to pressures and constraints associated with social relationships. However, our understanding of how the nature and quality of social relationships relates to the use and evolution of communication is limited by a lack of directly comparable methods across multiple levels of analysis. Here, we analysed observational data from 111 wild groups belonging to 26 non-human primate species, to test how vocal communication relates to dominance style (the strictness with which a dominance hierarchy is enforced, ranging from 'despotic' to 'tolerant').

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Underwater shockwave processing (USP) is a non-thermal food processing method where a high-energy impulse is generated near a food product submerged in a liquid. The resulting shockwave transfers energy to the food, and is used to improve quality, safety, and nutritional aspects. This review presents the origin and evolution of the technology, principles of shockwave generation, mechanism of action, and applications in the food industry.

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  • Parasites play a crucial role in ecosystems by affecting food chains, competition, and biodiversity, yet their complex interactions in nature remain poorly understood.
  • In Southeast Asia, particularly in Borneo, habitat changes and wildlife circulation impact these relationships, making the study of primate parasites essential for understanding transmission processes.
  • This research investigates the gastrointestinal helminth parasites in Bornean primates, revealing diverse and widespread parasitic infections, with new records for several primate species, highlighting significant gaps in our knowledge of primate-parasite dynamics in the region.
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  • * In three experiments, these macaques reacted to human gaze in different contexts (threat, cooperation, competition), showing varied behaviors based on the situation.
  • * The findings suggest that macaques interpret human gaze contextually; they perceive direct gaze as threatening and respond to cooperative cues but appear unable to consider the perspective of a competitor.
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  • Rank among macaque species influences their access to food, with subordinate individuals needing specific strategies to secure resources, particularly in despotic species.* -
  • In a study comparing three macaque species, tolerant species were more successful in obtaining food without relying on specific tactics, whereas despotic species required subordinates to use stealthy or opportunistic tactics.* -
  • The findings indicate that the social hierarchy and dominance styles in macaque species predict the use of different food retrieval strategies, enhancing our understanding of tactical behaviors in social animals.*
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  • Primates exist in varied social systems with differing levels of dominance, affecting their social tolerance and access to resources, particularly food.
  • The study focused on four macaque species and explored how their dominance styles influenced their willingness to try new foods (neophilia) and their social interactions around food.
  • Results showed that higher dominance and social integration led to better access to food across species, and surprising patterns indicated that more despotic species exhibited higher social tolerance than less despotic ones, suggesting that individual traits may be more crucial than just dominance rank.
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  • Play behavior varies widely among mammalian species, influenced by their social structures and dominance hierarchies.
  • A study comparing Japanese macaques and moor macaques revealed that less despotic species (moor macaques) engage in more frequent and varied play, while more despotic species (Japanese macaques) tend to display more grooming and aggressive interactions.
  • The results suggest that social play and dominance style are linked, with the moor macaques showing greater engagement in playful activities and fewer aggressive escalations compared to the Japanese macaques.
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