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Mitigating environmental impacts of chicken production – the role of co-product valorisation
Get PDFFood loss and waste (FLW) has become a significant issue for mitigating environmental impacts in the food system. The global food system contributes substantially to climate change, eutrophication, and other environmental concerns, predominantly attributable to the rearing and processing of animal products. Despite these concerns, chicken production is increasing worldwide and is a key focal point for mitigating greenhouse gas emissions. However, in many countries, high-nutritional value chicken co-products such as feet, giblets, and other offal are still undervalued, often considered waste and sent for valorisation rather than being consumed, leading to a limited understanding within the literature of their environmental implications.
Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) studies in the agri-food sector typically allocate environmental burdens between main products and co-products based on economic value, resulting in a lower burden for chicken co-products due to their lower price compared to carcass meat. This study conducts an LCA on a typical tonne of chicken co-products in the UK to evaluate the environmental burdens of different treatment scenarios and analyse the impact of different allocation methods. It compares the current treatment with four scenarios: sending all to pet food, rendering, incineration, or anaerobic digestion, using system expansion to assess the influence of avoided products. Results show that economic allocation based on raw material price is on average 122 % lower than mass allocation, with the difference of global warming reaching 184 %, equivalent to 1953 kg CO2 eq/tonne. Processing all co-products into pet food is the most environmentally friendly option, while incineration generates the largest impact. Outcomes under system expansion are highly sensitive to the choice of displaced products, with soybean meal and palm oil substitution yielding the greatest benefits. The findings highlight the overlooked role of edible co-products in sustainable food system. However, the “pet food only” scenario does not achieve absolute reductions, suggesting that further valorisation pathways of chicken giblets, including greater integration into human diets, warrant investigation
Correction of ERA5 temperature and relative humidity biases by bivariate quantile mapping for contrail formation analysis
Get PDFAviation contributes to global emissions of carbon dioxide, aerosol particles, water vapor (WV), and other compounds. WV promotes the formation of condensation trails (contrails), which are known for their net warming effect on the
climate. Contrail formation is often estimated using the Schmidt-Appleman criterion (SAc) together with meteorological data from the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) ERA5 atmospheric reanalysis model. We compare ERA5 output of temperature and relative humidity in the upper troposphere and lower stratosphere with five years of In-service Aircraft for a Global Observing System (IAGOS) observations over the North Atlantic. Good agreement was found for the temperature fields with a maximum bias of −0.4 K (200 hPa level), while larger biases were found for relative humidity of up
to −5.5 % (250 hPa level). Using original ERA5 data, conditions prone to contrail formation occurred 50.3 % and 7.9 % of the time for non-persistent and persistent contrails, respectively, while 44.0 % and 12.1 % were flagged in the IAGOS data. We propose a multivariate quantile mapping (QM) correction to remove systematic biases by post-processing ERA5 temperature and relative humidity fields with respect to contrail formation. The QM correction was applied to the post-process ERA5 data, reducing the temperature bias to less than 0.1 K and the relative humidity bias to less than −1.5 %, resulting in 44 % and 10.9 % of the data points now flagged for non-persistent and persistent contrail formation, respectively. Our bias correction generalizes well compared to the IAGOS observations. How it generalizes outside the IAGOS regions remains to be investigated
Women and the contemporary Scottish stage
No full textThe twenty-first century has witnessed a welcome and continuing growth in the representation of women in Scottish theatre across a range of roles. As well as providing statistics in support of this claim, this chapter considers the significant contribution made by these women to the developing ecology of theatre and performance in Scotland. It analyses the work of prominent playwrights including Zinnie Harris and Rona Munro, whose work evidences a remarkable breadth of stylistic and generic range. It also considers the contribution of women programmers and producers and thinks about some of the ways that women have collaborated to create distinctive and impactful work
Dietary fats and cardiometabolic health—from public health to personalised nutrition: ‘one for all’ and ‘all for one’
Get PDFThis paper provides a summary of the 2023 British Nutrition Foundation AnnualLecture by Professor Julie Lovegrove. Professor Lovegrove is the head of theHugh Sinclair Unit of Human Nutrition at the University of Reading. ProfessorLovegrove, who was nominated for the BNF Prize for her outstanding contributionto nutritional sciences has published over 300 scientific papers and madea major contribution to establishing the relevance of dietary fat quality in thedevelopment and prevention of cardiometabolic disease
Changes in event soil moisture-temperature coupling can intensify very extreme heat beyond expectations
Get PDFThe most disastrous heatwaves are very extreme events with return periods of hundreds of years, but traditionally, climate research has focussed on moderate extreme events occurring every couple of years or even several times within a year. Here, we use three Earth System Model large ensembles to assess whether very extreme heat events respond differently to global warming than moderate extreme events. We find that the warming signal of very extreme heat can be amplified or dampened substantially compared to moderate extremes. This modulation is detectable already in mid-century projections. In the mid-latitudes, it can be explained by changes in event soil moisture-temperature coupling during the hottest day of the year. The changes depend on the interplay of present soil moisture and coupling during heat events as well as projected precipitation changes. This mechanism is robust across models, albeit with large spatial uncertainties. Our findings are highly relevant for climate risk assessments and adaptation planning
Improvement of AlphaFold2-based methods for modelling quaternary structures of proteins
Get PDFThe functions of proteins are determined by their 3D structures, hence different methods have
been developed in order to predict protein structures as a stepping stone to better
understanding their functions and interactions. Protein structure modelling was a process that
often involved two different stages: modelling and refinement. However, the release of the
deep neural network-based AlphaFold2 (AF2) as a protein modelling tool in 2020 has enabled
significant advances in protein bioinformatics. These advances have made it possible to
predict models of monomeric structures that are close to structures derived experimentally.
Thus, the effective application of machine learning approaches has reduced the need for the
traditional refinement process. Instead, modellers use end-to-end processes for improvements
covering both modelling and refinement. One of the most important developments in for such
processes was the open-access release of the AF2 code. As a result, almost all recent tools
have integrated the AF2 code into their own pipelines using different methods and parameters,
aiming to obtain better models than those produced by the default AF2 method. However, the
successes achieved for monomeric globular structures have not yet been realised for
multimeric globular structures, and this has increased the need for the development of new
modelling tools. Although many AF2 versions have been introduced in the process, the full
effectiveness of AF2 - and indirectly, which structures it can accurately predict - is not yet fully
understood. Therefore, the basis of this research is to investigate the features of this black box
and to explore how to use it most effectively for the improvement of quaternary structure
models. In this direction, we aimed to design an improved AF2-based multimeric protein
modelling pipeline.
The effect of recycling, a key part of the AF2 algorithm, on the refinement of models is
investigated in Chapter 2. The results show that in both AF2 versions (AF2_Advanced and
AF2_Multimer (AF2M)) the quality of the predicted protein model improves as the number of
recycles increases. It is also shown that while 3 cycles is the default value for the AF2 versions,
12 cycles may be more effective for both main versions. With the integration of the custom
template option into the AF2M code, the effect of custom templates and recycling methods on
protein modelling are examined in Chapter 3. It is shown that providing initial structural
information to AF2M as an input and further recycling can lead to better quality structure
models. It is also emphasised that using multiple sequence alignment (MSA) inputs is more
effective in AF2M compared to providing a single sequence (SS). Another new parameter
introduced for AF2M for improving modelling was the custom MSA option. Although the
effectiveness of custom templates and custom MSA options have been supported by many
studies, the effect of altering these input features on AF2M rather than using the defaults had
not been fully revealed. In Chapter 4, we discovered that when multimeric custom template
structures are given to AF2M as a “single-chain” protein structure, a cumulative improvement
in TM-scores and IDDT scores are observed, although there is no improvement in interface
scores (QS-scores and DockQ_wave scores). Furthermore, in order to obtain custom MSAs,
disordered residues in homologous sequences were deleted within MSAs, so that AF2M made
its predictions only from residues corresponding to ordered regions. As a result, it was also
observed that AF2M obtained higher quality protein structures in more than half of the targets.
These two major results emphasise that input changes to AF2M can be more effective for
target-specific protein modelling than for general protein modelling. Finally, based on the
results from the previous chapters, we designed two successive versions of a protein modelling
tool called MultiFOLD, which aims to create a pool of models with conformational sampling
using custom template recycling followed by ranking and selection. In Chapter 5, through
extensive analysis of benchmarking data we demonstrate that MultiFOLD is particularly
effective in modelling multimeric globular structures, and the latest version, MultiFOLD2,
outperformed all other servers including AlphaFold3 (AF3) that are participating in the CAMEO-BETA project. With the acquisition of better-quality protein structures, it is now possible to
better infer function and to model protein-ligand interactions in downstream analyses
History teachers as curriculum-makers in policy and practice: quantitative insights from England and Scotland
Get PDFIn England and Scotland, the History National Curriculum avoids the prescription of specific content; expecting schools instead to devise a curriculum appropriate to their pupils within broad guidance. This means in both countries, teachers apparently have responsibility for constructing a curriculum: selecting content, sequencing learning and identifying resources, but only in Scotland is it explicitly stated in policy that teachers act as curriculum-makers.
Based on the 2021 UK Historical Association survey, this paper explores the extent to which history teachers in England and Scotland use their curricular autonomy to respond to calls for diversified curricula. Drawing on responses from 8% of England’s secondary schools and 20% of Scotland’s, the data suggest that, although teachers in Scotland are more explicitly framed as curriculum-makers in policy, it is history teachers in English secondary schools who are more likely to have diversified their curricula.
The paper explores possible explanations for these findings and suggests that demographic diversity, inspection cultures, and knowledge exchange networks exercise greater influence over teachers’ willingness to diversify their curricula than the positioning of teachers in policy
A systematic review of the effect of gene–lifestyle interactions on metabolic-disease-related traits in South Asian populations
Get PDFContext Recent data from the South Asian subregion have raised concern about the dramatic increase in the prevalence of metabolic diseases, which are influenced by genetic and lifestyle factors. Objective The aim of this systematic review was to summarize the contemporary evidence for the effect of gene–lifestyle interactions on metabolic outcomes in this population. Data sources PubMed, Web of Science, and SCOPUS databases were searched up until March 2023 for observational and intervention studies investigating the interaction between genetic variants and lifestyle factors such as diet and physical activity on obesity and type 2 diabetes traits. Data extraction Of the 14 783 publications extracted, 15 were deemed eligible for inclusion in this study. Data extraction was carried out independently by 3 investigators. The quality of the included studies was assessed using the Appraisal Tool for Cross-Sectional Studies (AXIS), the Risk Of Bias In Non-randomized Studies—of Interventions (ROBINS-I), and the methodological quality score for nutrigenetics studies. Data analysis Using a narrative synthesis approach, the findings were presented in textual and tabular format. Together, studies from India (n = 8), Pakistan (n = 3), Sri Lanka (n = 1), and the South Asian diaspora in Singapore and Canada (n = 3) reported 543 gene–lifestyle interactions, of which 132 (∼24%) were statistically significant. These results were related to the effects of the interaction of genetic factors with physical inactivity, poor sleep habits, smoking, and dietary intake of carbohydrates, protein, and fat on the risk of metabolic disease in this population. Conclusions The findings of this systematic review provide evidence of gene–lifestyle interactions impacting metabolic traits within the South Asian population. However, the lack of replication and correction for multiple testing and the small sample size of the included studies may limit the conclusiveness of the evidence. Note, this paper is part of the Nutrition Reviews Special Collection on Precision Nutrition. Systematic Review Registration PROSPERO registration No. CRD42023402408