Progression of swine fecal microbiota during early stages of life and its association with performance: a longitudinal study.

Background: It is vital to understand healthy gut microbiota composition throughout early life stages when environments are changing, and immunity is developing. There are limited large-scale longitudinal studies classifying healthy succession of swine microbiota. The objectives of this study were to (a) determine the microbiota composition of fecal samples collected from piglets within a few days after birth until one-week post-weaning, and (b) investigate the associations of early fecal microbiota with pig growth performance in nursery and later growing stages.

Simultaneous multi-crop land suitability prediction from remote sensing data using semi-supervised learning.

Land suitability models for Canada are currently based on single-crop inventories and expert opinion. We present a data-driven multi-layer perceptron that simultaneously predicts the land suitability of several crops in Canada, including barley, peas, spring wheat, canola, oats, and soy. Available crop yields from 2013-2020 are downscaled to the farm level by masking the district level crop yield data to focus only on areas where crops are cultivated and leveraging soil-climate-landscape variables obtained from Google Earth Engine for crop yield prediction.

Impact of Swine and Cattle Manure Treatment on the Microbial Composition and Resistome of Soil and Drainage Water.

Evaluating potential environmental and clinical impacts of industrial antibiotic use is critical in mitigating the spread of antimicrobial resistance. Using soil columns to simulate field application of swine or cattle manure and subsequent rain events, and a targeted qPCR-based approach, we tracked resistance genes from source manures and identified important differences in antimicrobial resistance gene transport and enrichment over time in the soil and water of artificially drained cropland. The source manures had distinct microbial community and resistance gene profiles, and these differences were also reflected in the soil columns after manure application.

Stable variable ranking and selection in regularized logistic regression for severely imbalanced big binary data.

We develop a novel covariate ranking and selection algorithm for regularized ordinary logistic regression (OLR) models in the presence of severe class-imbalance in high dimensional datasets with correlated signal and noise covariates. Class-imbalance is resolved using response-based subsampling which we also employ to achieve stability in variable selection by creating an ensemble of regularized OLR models fitted to subsampled (and balanced) datasets. The regularization methods considered in our study include Lasso, adaptive Lasso (adaLasso) and ridge regression.

Compositional analysis of the tonsil microbiota in relationship to Streptococcus suis disease in nursery pigs in Ontario.

Background: The tonsil of the soft palate in pigs is the colonization site of both commensal and pathogenic microbial agents. Streptococcus suis infections are a significant economic problem in the swine industry. The development of S.

Integrating population dynamics models and distance sampling data: a spatial hierarchical state-space approach.

Stochastic versions of Gompertz, Ricker, and various other dynamics models play a fundamental role in quantifying strength of density dependence and studying long-term dynamics of wildlife populations. These models are frequently estimated using time series of abundance estimates that are inevitably subject to observation error and missing data. This issue can be addressed with a state-space modeling framework that jointly estimates the observed data model and the underlying stochastic population dynamics (SPD) model.

Antenatal sildenafil treatment attenuates pulmonary hypertension in experimental congenital diaphragmatic hernia.

Background: Lung hypoplasia and persistent pulmonary hypertension of the newborn limit survival in congenital diaphragmatic hernia (CDH). Unlike other diseases resulting in persistent pulmonary hypertension of the newborn, infants with CDH are refractory to inhaled nitric oxide (NO). Nitric oxide mediates pulmonary vasodilatation at birth in part via cyclic GMP production.