At approximately 24 wk of age, the wether lambs were slaughtered to determine carcass characteristics and muscle samples were taken from the bicep femoris. The abundance of mature myostatin protein in

muscle from 1 wk old lambs was less (P = 0.05) in MSTN A/A and MSTN A/G compared with MSTN G/G lambs. However, at 4 and 24 wk the MSTN A/A lambs had a greater (P = 0.04) abundance of myostatin protein compared with the MSTN A/G and MSTN G/G lambs. The abundance of mature myostatin did not differ between genotypes in plasma but the myostatin protein did increase as the lambs aged. At slaughter the MSTN A/A wether lambs had greater dressing percentages (P = 0.04), shortloin (P = 0.01), topside (P < 0.001), and round (P = 0.01) weights but did not differ in final BW or HCW (P > 0.05). The

MSTN selleck chemicals A/A lambs had more muscle fibers (P = 0.02) in the cross-section of LM between the 12th and 13th rib. The MSTN A/A lambs also had greater lean (P = 0.002), less fat (P = 0.009), and reduced organ (heart, liver, spleen, and kidneys) mass as determined by computed tomography scanning than MSTN G/G lambs. selleck compound The results of this study demonstrated that lambs homozygous for the MSTN g+6723G > A mutation have changes in carcass characteristics (dressing and total lean), organ weights, and muscle fiber number. This may be due to reduced myostatin protein early in utero, but after 4 wk of age there was no difference in the abundance of mature myostatin protein in muscle or plasma among MSTN A/A, MSTN A/G, and MSTN G/G genotypes. (C) 2013 American Society of Animal Science. All rights reserved.”
“Off-policy reinforcement learning is aimed at efficiently using data samples gathered from a policy that is different from the currently optimized policy. A common approach is to use importance sampling techniques for compensating for the bias of value function estimators caused by the difference between the data-sampling policy and the target policy. However, existing off-policy methods

often do not take the variance of the value function estimators explicitly into account and therefore their performance tends Autophagy inhibitor manufacturer to be unstable. To cope with this problem, we propose using an adaptive importance sampling technique which allows us to actively control the trade-off between bias and variance. We further provide a method for optimally determining the trade-off parameter based on a variant of cross-validation. We demonstrate the usefulness of the proposed approach through simulations. (C) 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.”
“Objective To compare the length of hospitalisation for infants with bronchiolitis across the Eastern region and to assess the impact of the varying admission rates in each hospital.