L'ELEVAGE OVIN EXTENSIF EN TUNISIE : DISPONIBILITES ALIMENTAIRES ET INNOVATIONS POUR LA VALORISATION DES RESSOURCES FOURRAGERES LOCALES

N° ISBN - 978-2-7380-1284-5International audienceSheep farming plays a vital role in food safety in Tunisia. This paper aims to reflect the current status of sheep farming through an analysis of their food availability and limits. A study of the possibilities for improving the local feeding resources is then made identifying the innovations in this field. Results show that the decrease in pasture areas is caused by the over-grazing, the frequent droughts and the expansion of cereal crops and tree plantations. Use of concentrates becomes more frequent in livestock industry. These concentrates are heavily based on imported ingredients whose prices have tripled over the last two decades. Consequently, a renewed interest has been given to the use of local feed resources and looking for alternatives such as their partial or total replacement of the imported raw materials. The use of the local barley and field beans in the sheep feeding could ensure acceptable animal performances. In the arid and semi-arid Tunisian zones, thousands of hectares of fodder shrubs have been established, especially spineless cactus, Atriplex nummularia and Acacia cyanophylla. Other innovations in animal feeding demonstrated the effectiveness of alternative feed resources like using feed blocks which could represent a promising nutritional tool especially when animals are grazing on poor pastures, the use of multi-purpose shrubs, or several agricultural and agro-industrial by-products (treated straws, cakes, pulps...). A lack of adequate co-ordination and synergy between the different stakeholders is inhibiting the progress and implementation of transversal approaches that are necessary for the delivery of integrated sustainable policies

Effect of diet supplementation on growth and reproduction in camels under arid range conditions

Eighteen pregnant dromedary females (Camelus dromedarius) were used to determine the effect of concentrate supplement on growth and reproductive performances in peri-partum period. The females were divided into supplemented (n = 9; S) and unsupplemented (n = 9; C) experimental groups. All animals grazed, with one mature male, 7 to 8 hours per day on salty pasture rangelands. During night, they were kept in pen, where each female of group S received 4 kg per day of concentrate supplement during the last 3 months of gestation and 5 kg per day during the first 3 months post-partum. During the last 90 days of gestation daily body weight gain (DBG) was at least tenfold more important in group S than in group C (775 g vs. 72 g respectively). Supplementation affected birth weight of offspring (30.3 kg vs. 23.4 kg) and its DBG (806 g vs. 430 g) in group S and group C respectively. During the post-partum period, females in group S gained in weight (116 g per day) whereas females in group C lost more than 200 g per day. The mean post-partum interval to the first heat and the percentage of females in heat were 29.5 day and 44.4/ vs. 41.2 day and 71.4/ for the C and S groups, respectively. We conclude that under range conditions, dietary supplementation of dromedary during late pregnancy stage and post-partum period improves productive and reproductive parameters

Runtime-guided management of stacked DRAM memories in task parallel programs

Stacked DRAM memories have become a reality in High-Performance Computing (HPC) architectures. These memories provide much higher bandwidth while consuming less power than traditional off-chip memories, but their limited memory capacity is insufficient for modern HPC systems. For this reason, both stacked DRAM and off-chip memories are expected to co-exist in HPC architectures, giving raise to different approaches for architecting the stacked DRAM in the system. This paper proposes a runtime approach to transparently manage stacked DRAM memories in task-based programming models. In this approach the runtime system is in charge of copying the data accessed by the tasks to the stacked DRAM, without any complex hardware support nor modifications to the application code. To mitigate the cost of copying data between the stacked DRAM and the off-chip memory, the proposal includes an optimization to parallelize the copies across idle or additional helper threads. In addition, the runtime system is aware of the reuse pattern of the data accessed by the tasks, and can exploit this information to avoid unworthy copies of data to the stacked DRAM. Results on the Intel Knights Landing processor show that the proposed techniques achieve an average speedup of 14% against the state-of-the-art library to manage the stacked DRAM and 29% against a stacked DRAM architected as a hardware cache.This work has been supported by the RoMoL ERC Advanced Grant (GA 321253), by the European HiPEAC Network of Excellence, by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (contract TIN2015-65316-P), by the Generalitat de Catalunya (contracts 2014-SGR-1051 and 2014-SGR-1272) and by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement 779877). M. Moreto has been partially supported by the Spanish Ministry of Economy, Industry and Competitiveness under Ramon y Cajal fellowship number RYC-2016-21104.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Asymptotic behavior of orthogonal polynomials corresponding to a measure with infinite discrete part off an arc

We study the asymptotic behavior of orthogonal polynomials. The measure is concentrated on a complex rectifiable arc and has an infinity of masses in the region exterior to the arc

Drivers of genetic diversity in secondary metabolic gene clusters within a fungal species

Drivers of genetic diversity in secondary metabolic gene clusters within a fungal speciesFilamentous fungi produce a diverse array of secondary metabolites (SMs) critical for defense, virulence, and communication. The metabolic pathways that produce SMs are found in contiguous gene clusters in fungal genomes, an atypical arrangement for metabolic pathways in other eukaryotes. Comparative studies of filamentous fungal species have shown that SM gene clusters are often either highly divergent or uniquely present in one or a handful of species, hampering efforts to determine the genetic basis and evolutionary drivers of SM gene cluster divergence. Here, we examined SM variation in 66 cosmopolitan strains of a single species, the opportunistic human pathogen Aspergillus fumigatus. Investigation of genome-wide within-species variation revealed 5 general types of variation in SM gene clusters: nonfunctional gene polymorphisms; gene gain and loss polymorphisms; whole cluster gain and loss polymorphisms; allelic polymorphisms, in which different alleles corresponded to distinct, nonhomologous clusters; and location polymorphisms, in which a cluster was found to differ in its genomic location across strains. These polymorphisms affect the function of representative A. fumigatus SM gene clusters, such as those involved in the production of gliotoxin, fumigaclavine, and helvolic acid as well as the function of clusters with undefined products. In addition to enabling the identification of polymorphisms, the detection of which requires extensive genome-wide synteny conservation (e.g., mobile gene clusters and nonhomologous cluster alleles), our approach also implicated multiple underlying genetic drivers, including point mutations, recombination, and genomic deletion and insertion events as well as horizontal gene transfer from distant fungi. Finally, most of the variants that we uncover within A. fumigatus have been previously hypothesized to contribute to SM gene cluster diversity across entire fungal classes and phyla. We suggest that the drivers of genetic diversity operating within a fungal species shown here are sufficient to explain SM cluster macroevolutionary patterns.National Science Foundation (grant number DEB-1442113). Received by AR. U.S. National Library of Medicine training grant (grant number 2T15LM007450). Received by ALL. Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Cientı´fico e 573 Tecnológico. Northern Portugal Regional Operational Programme (grant number NORTE-01- 0145-FEDER-000013). Received by FR. Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do 572 Estado de São Paulo. Received by GHG. National Institutes of Health (grant number R01 AI065728-01). Received by NPK. National Science Foundation (grant number IOS-1401682). Received by JHW. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Positive Solutions for Multi-Order Nonlinear Fractional Systems

In this paper, we study the existence of positive solutions for a class of multi-order systems of fractional differential equations with nonlocal conditions. The main tool used is Schauder fixed point theorem and upper and lower solutions method. The results obtained are illustrated by a numerical example

Régénération de la suberaie tunisienne : état des lieux, contraintes et avancées techniques

Alors que la situation des suberaies tunisiennes est extrêmement inquiétante, avec une perte de la moitié de sa surface en 80 ans, la régénération naturelle est pratiquement inexistante. C’est pourquoi les services forestiers tunisiens ont mis en place des essais proposant d’autres techniques de reconstitution artificielle, notamment la plantation. Leur réussite est toutefois fortement liée aux conditions climatiques et aux activités humaines

Removal of methylene blue with a highly effective hydroxyapatite-silica nanocomposite

Two Hydroxyapatite-silica nanocomposite adsorbent (HApS220 and HApS230) were successfully synthesized using sol-gel technique. The samples were characterized by powder X-ray diffraction (XRD), Infrared spectroscopy (IR), scanning electron microscopy (SEM) and energy-dispersive spectroscopy (EDS), which confirmed the formation of a Hydroxyapatite-silica nanocomposite. The synthesized powders were then used for adsorption of methylene blue (MB). Both compounds possessed high absorption capacities, the adsorption equilibrium time is around 10 min. HApS230 sample shows higher adsorption capacity compared to HApS220. Furthermore, isotherm studies show that the adsorption used is an ion exchange process and that Temkin isotherm describes the adsorption better compared to the Langmuir and Freundlich and Dubinin-Radushkevich isotherms. Kinetics studies confirm that the adsorption follow the pseudo-second order model and chemisorption mechanism. Thermodynamics’ studies confirm that the adsorption of MB on HApS samples is a spontaneous endothermic process. The average removal effectiveness of MB reached about 89.02% (6.389 mg/g adsorption capacity) and 91.36% (6.55 mg/g adsorption capacity) for HApS220 and HApS230 respectivel

The FlbA-regulated predicted transcription factor Fum21 of <i>Aspergillus niger</i> is involved in fumonisin production

Aspergillus niger secretes proteins throughout the colony except for the zone that forms asexual spores called conidia. Inactivation of flbA that encodes a regulator of G-protein signaling results in colonies that are unable to reproduce asexually and that secrete proteins throughout the mycelium. In addition, the ΔflbA strain shows cell lysis and has thinner cell walls. Expression analysis showed that 38 predicted transcription factor genes are differentially expressed in strain ΔflbA. Here, the most down-regulated predicted transcription factor gene, called fum21, was inactivated. Growth, conidiation, and protein secretion were not affected in strain Δfum21. Whole genome expression analysis revealed that 63 and 11 genes were down- and up-regulated in Δfum21, respectively, when compared to the wild-type strain. Notably, 24 genes predicted to be involved in secondary metabolism were down-regulated in Δfum21, including 10 out of 12 genes of the fumonisin cluster. This was accompanied by absence of fumonisin production in the deletion strain and a 25% reduction in production of pyranonigrin A. Together, these results link FlbA-mediated sporulation-inhibited secretion with mycotoxin production