Characterisation of Early-Life Fecal Microbiota in Susceptible and Healthy Pigs to Post-Weaning Diarrhoea.

Early-life microbial exposure is of particular importance to growth, immune system development and long-lasting health. Hence, early microbiota composition is a promising predictive biomarker for health and disease but still remains poorly characterized in regards to susceptibility to diarrhoea. In the present study, we aimed to assess if gut bacterial community diversity and composition during the suckling period were associated with differences in susceptibility of pigs to post-weaning diarrhoea.

Resolution of fluorophore mixtures in biological media using fluorescence spectroscopy and Monte Carlo simulation.

In excitation-emission fluorescence spectroscopy, the simultaneous quantitative prediction and qualitative resolution of mixtures of fluorophores using chemometrics is a major challenge because of the scattering and reabsorption effects (turbidity) presented mainly in biomaterials. The measured fluorescence spectra are distorted by multiple scattering and reabsorption events in the surrounding medium, thereby diminishing the performance of the commonly used three-way resolution methods such as parallel factor (PARAFAC) analysis or multivariate curve resolution-alternating least squares (MCR-ALS). In this work we show that spectral loadings and concentration profiles from model mixtures provided using PARAFAC and MCR-ALS are severely distorted by reabsorption and scattering phenomena, although both models fit rather well the experimental data in terms of percentage of the explained variance.