Evaluation of n-alkanes as markers for estimation of dry matter intake and digestibility in steers consuming all-forage or forage-concentrate diets
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The study examined the reliability of the alkane-based and chromium (Cr)/in-vitro-based procedures relative to the total fecal collection (TC) technique for estimation of dry matter (DM) intake an d DM digestibility of forage or forage-concentrate diets fed to steers. Eight Holstein steers (208 ± 19.2 kg) were assigned to four dietary treatments in a three-period balanced incomplete block design. The four dietary treatments were: (1) 100% meadow brome grass hay (B); (2) 50% B + 50% alfalfa hay (BA); (3) 50% B + 50% barley grain (BB); and (4) 25% B + 25% alfalfa hay + 50% barley grain (BAB). Two types of hay were chosen to achieve a wide range of alkane intake. Appropriate portions of forages and grain were mixed as a total mixed ration and fed in two equal portions twice daily at 2.5% of body weight, DM basis. Two controlled-release capsules, one containing n-alkanes (C 32 and C 36 ) and the other chromic oxide, were placed into the steer's reticulo-rumen by oral administration on day 1 of each 30-d period. Total fecal output was collected twice daily from day 8 to 14 of each period to establish the fecal recovery of Cr and the alkanes, and to determine apparent DM digestibility. A rectal fecal grab sample was also taken every 4 h from day 15 to 16. Fecal recovery of the natural alkanes, C 31 and C 33 , was low, ranging from 59.5 to 77.3%, whereas the range in fecal recovery of the dosed alkanes, C 32 and C 36 , was 83.3 to 95.5%, and of Cr was 82.7 to 95.8% across the diets. The estimated DM intake was similar across all diets using the C 31 /C 32 and C 33 /C 32 alkane ratios; however, estimated DM intakes using the alkane method were significantly (P < 0.05) lower compared to TC and Cr/in vitro methods for the BB diet. Addition of barley to the forage diets resulted in a higher DM digestibility for BB and BAB diets by all methods. The estimated DM digestibility using the C 31 /C 32 ratio was lower compared to the TC method for diet B, BA and BB, whereas the estimated DM digestibility using C 33 /C 32 was lower only for the BB diet. Sampling every 4 h resulted in a significantly higher ratio of C 31 to C 32 in feces compared to samples collected by the TC method. Rectal grab sampling did not change (P > 0.05) the estimated DM intake using either combination of alkane ratio. Key words: Alkanes, chromium oxide, dry matter intake, dry matter digestibility, steer
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".