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Section: Animal Science ; Topics: Agricultural sciences, Health sciences

Understanding the implementation of antimicrobial resistance policies in Vietnam: a multilayer analysis of the veterinary drug value chain

Bâtie, Chloé; Duy, Nguyen Van; Minh Khue, Nguyen Thi; Peyre, Marisa; Bordier, Marion; Dien, Nguyen Thi; Ton, Vu Dinh; Goutard, Flavie

10.24072/pcjournal.512 - Peer Community Journal, Volume 5 (2025), article no. e21.
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Reducing antibiotic use in livestock production has been a target for national action plans worldwide. The Vietnamese livestock plan issued in 2017 has, among other objectives, strengthened the regulatory framework for antibiotic use. While a progressive ban on prophylactic antibiotics in feed and the introduction of mandatory prescriptions have been introduced, the level of implementation of these measures remains unknown. This study explores the level of understanding, acceptance, and application of these regulations among veterinary drug value chain stakeholders. An iterative stakeholder mapping and analysis of the veterinary drug value chain was conducted in North and South Vietnam. We organized one focus group discussion in Hanoi with 12 participants and conducted 39 semi-structured interviews with governmental authorities, national research centers, foreign partners, and private stakeholders along the value chain. The discourses were analyzed to (1) map the veterinary drug value chain and interactions among stakeholders, (2) analyze stakeholder’s technical and social capital regarding regulations, and (3) identify factors influencing their implementation. From the map of the veterinary drug value chain, we identified 30 categories of stakeholders. Based on the map, the capital, and the analysis of the discourse, we identified 10 factors that could influence their implementation. These factors included stakeholder perception of the new regulations, their level of knowledge, the availability of technical guidance, conflict of economic interest between stakeholders, scale-related management discrepancies, the technical and financial barriers to the implementation of the regulations at the local level, the presence of an informal distribution channel, international influence, consumer demand for food safety, and the willingness to reduce the burden of antibiotic resistance. It was clearly identified that new regulations are a necessary step to reducing antibiotic usage in Vietnam, but that the lack of local stakeholder involvement combined with technical constraints were barriers to their implementation. The study underlined the need for greater involvement of local stakeholders in the development of regulations as well as the need to mainstream innovations developed by small producers.
Section: Archaeology ; Topics: Archaeology

Analysis of the abundance of radiocarbon samples as count data

de Navascués, Miguel; Burgarella, Concetta; Jakobsson, Mattias

10.24072/pcjournal.522 - Peer Community Journal, Volume 5 (2025), article no. e20.
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The analysis of the abundance of radiocarbon samples through time has become a popular method to address questions of demography in archaeology. The history of this approach is marked by the use of the Sum of Probability Distributions (SPD), a key methodological development that first allowed researchers to visualize the abundance of radiocarbon samples on a calibrated temporal scale. However, the lack of a mathematical definition hinders the use of SPD in a proper statistical framework. Recent developments of model-based approaches have allowed a more rigorous statistical analysis of the abundance of radiocarbon data. Despite these advances, these methods inherit from the SPD an interpretation of the abundance of samples as a probability distribution. In this work we propose a change of perspective by treating radiocarbon data as count data. We present an approach that models the expected number of samples occurring at each year. We argue that this model provides more interpretable parameters and better accounts for the uncertainty in the number of samples. The performance of the proposed approach is evaluated through simulations and compared to an alternative state-of-the-art approach. Our new method is competitive with the state-of-the-art model. Furthermore, we demonstrate the computational burden of using the SPD as summary statistics under an approximate Bayesian computation analysis and propose more efficient summary statistics. Finally, we use a dataset of radiocarbon samples from Ireland and Britain to provide an application example. The results of these analyses are largely congruent with previous work on the same dataset except in revealing an earlier start of the Neolithic demographic expansion.
Section: Mathematical & Computational Biology ; Topics: Biophysics and computational biology, Applied mathematics

Biology-Informed inverse problems for insect pests detection using pheromone sensors

Malou, Thibault; Parisey, Nicolas; Adamczyk-Chauvat, Katarzyna; Vergu, Elisabeta; Laroche, Béatrice; Calatayud, Paul-André; Lucas, Philippe; Labarthe, Simon

10.24072/pcjournal.520 - Peer Community Journal, Volume 5 (2025), article no. e19.
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Most insects have the ability to modify the odor landscape in order to communicate with their conspecies during key phases of their life cycle such as reproduction. They release pheromones in their nearby environment, volatile compounds that are detected by insects of the same species with exceptional specificity and sensitivity. Efficient pheromone detection is then an interesting lever for insect pest management in a precision agroecological culture context. A precise and early detection of pests using pheromone sensors offers a strategy for pest management before infestation. In this paper, we develop a biology-informed inverse problem framework that leverages temporal signals from a pheromone sensor network to build insect presence maps. Prior biological knowledge is introduced in the inverse problem by the mean of a specific penalty, using population dynamics PDE residuals. We benchmark the biological-informed penalty with other regularization terms such as Tikhonov, LASSO or composite penalties in a simplified toy model. We use classical comparison criteria, such as target reconstruction error, or Jaccard distance on pest presence-absence. But we also use more task-specific criteria such as the number of informative sensors during inference. Finally, the inverse problem is solved in a realistic context of pest infestation in an agricultural landscape by the fall armyworm (Spodoptera frugiperda).
Section: Microbiology ; Topics: Environmental sciences, Microbiology, Earth, atmospheric, and planetary sciences

Diel changes in the expression of a marker gene and candidate genes for intracellular amorphous CaCO₃ biomineralization in Microcystis

Bruley, Apolline; Gaëtan, Juliette; Gugger, Muriel; Pancrace, Claire; Millet, Maxime; Gaschignard, Geoffroy; Dezi, Manuela; Humbert, Jean-François; Leloup, Julie; Skouri-Panet, Fériel; Callebaut, Isabelle; Benzerara, Karim; Duprat, Elodie

10.24072/pcjournal.516 - Peer Community Journal, Volume 5 (2025), article no. e18.
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Phylogenetically diverse cyanobacteria biomineralize intracellular amorphous calcium carbonate (iACC) inclusions. This includes several genotypes of the Microcystis genus, a potentially toxic, bloom-forming cyanobacterium found worldwide in freshwater ecosystems. While we ignore the biological function of iACC and the molecular mechanisms driving their formation, this process may impact local geochemical cycles and/or be used for bioremediation strategies. Recently, a marker gene of this biomineralization pathway, named ccyA, was discovered. However, the function of the calcyanin protein encoded by ccyA remains unknown. Here, based on an RNA-Seq approach, we assess the expression of the ccyA gene in Microcystis aeruginosa PCC 7806 during a 24 h day/night cycle. The ccyA gene shows a clear day/night expression pattern with maximum transcript abundances during the second half of the night. This is consistent with the assumption that iACC biomineralization is related with photosynthesis and may therefore follow a day/night cycle as well. Moreover, several genes directly co-localized upstream and downstream of ccyA, on the same DNA strand show a similar expression pattern, including a cax gene encoding a calcium/proton exchanger and a gene encoding a protein with a domain also present in the N-terminal region of calcyanins in many iACC-forming cyanobacteria. This suggests that they all could be part of an operon, and may play a concerted role in iACC formation. Last, several other genes involved in carbon concentrating mechanisms and calcium transport show an expression pattern similar to that of ccyA. Overall, this study provides a list of candidate genes that may be involved in the biomineralization of iACC by cyanobacteria and whose role could be, in the future, analyzed by biochemistry and genetics approaches.

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The network image was drawn by Martin Grandjean: A force-based network visualization CC BY-SA