Dietary Oil Type and Late Feed Restriction Elicit Synergistic Effects on Growth,Caeca Bacteria,Carcass, Fat Accretion,and Muscle Lipids in Female Broilers

The influence of dietary oil type (OT) and late feed restriction (FR) on growth, caeca bacteria count, carcass, separable fat depots, serum and muscle lipids, and meat quality in broilers is examined. In total, 224, 21-day-old female Arbor acres broilers are randomly allotted to either PN, Unrestricted+50 g kg⁻¹ palm oil (PO); PR, 25%-FR+PO; SN, Unrestricted+50 g kg⁻¹ soybean oil (SO); or SR, 25%-FR+SO for 21 d. The SN and PR birds have the heaviest and lightest body weight gain (BWG), respectively. Feed conversion ratio (FCR) is poorer in the PN birds. Feed-restricted birds have more caeca Lactobacillus and lower Salmonella, serum cholesterol, and triglycerides. Carcass yield is higher in SR birds and lower in PN birds. The FR-OT interaction is significant for muscle lipids and weight of fat depots. The PN birds deposit more abdominal, intramuscular, sartorial, mesentery and neck fats, muscle saturated fatty acids, and C18:1n-9 and lower C18:3n-3 and C20:5n-3 than other birds. Neither OT nor FR affects the pH, color, water holding capacity, and oxidative stability of breast meat. The changes elicited by 25%-FR on BWG, FCR, carcass yield, depot fats, and muscle lipids in female broilers are dependent on dietary OT. Practical Application: Fast growth rate and unrestricted access to feed can predispose broiler chickens to excessive fat accretion, which is counterproductive. Producing high-quality carcasses that meet consumers’ expectation is crucial for sustainable and efficient broiler production. The possible interaction between dietary OT and late quantitative FR in mitigating excessive fat accretion and altering production indices in female broilers is explored. Late quantitative FR reduces BWG, FCR, serum lipids, caeca pH and Salmonella spp. and fat accretion in fat depots, and enhances carcass yield and caeca Lactobacillus spp. However, the impacts are more pronounced in the PO birds than the SO birds. Late FR improves the C18:3n-3 and C18:2n-6 contents in PO meat while reducing the C14:0 and C16:0 contents in SO meat. These findings explicate that dietary OT and late quantitative FR can be synergistically used to mitigate excessive fat accretion and alter growth, caeca microflora, and muscle lipids in broilers.     

Synthesis of Arabic from short sound clusters

This article describes an unrestricted vocabulary text-to-speech (TTS) conversion system for the synthesis of Standard Arabic (SA) speech. The system uses short phonetic clusters that are derived from the Arabic syllables to synthesize Arabic. Basic and phonetic variants of the synthesis units are defined after qualitative and quantitative analyses of the phonetics of SA. A speech database of the synthesis units and their phonetic variations is created and the units are tested to control their segmental quality. Besides the types of synthesis unit used, their enhancement with phonetic variants, and their segmental quality control, the production of good quality speech also depends on waveform analysis and the method used to concatenate the synthesis units together. Waveform analysis is needed to condition the selected synthesis units at their junctures to produce synthesized speech of better quality. The types of speech juncture between contiguous units, the phonetic characteristics of the sounds surrounding the junctures and the concatenation artifacts occurring across the junctures are important and will be discussed. The results of waveform analysis and smoothing algorithms will be presented. The intelligibility of synthesized Arabic by a standard intelligibility test method that is adapted to suit the Arabic phonetic characteristics and scoring the results of the tests will also be dealt with.     

A Personal Computer-based Speech Analysis And Synthesis System

An IBM PC XT enhanced with speech boards and added memory permits researchers to experiment in language synthesis before final commitment to a target speech synthesizer.