Contract farming has been increasingly found to benefit smallholders in developing countries, yet much less is known about its role in the poultry industry where economies of scale could be more prominent.  This study aims to narrow this gap by analysing the choice of contract farming among Chinese broiler producers using a nationally representative survey.  Simply cost-benefit analysis and multinomial logit regression modelling are jointly employed to explain contract farming decision making especially among small producers.  In contrast to many recent studies, we find that small producers, though not passively excluded, usually opt out of contract farming due to limited profitability when large producers are coexistent.  Such relationship is appropriately identified through a control function approach to correct for possible endogeneity.  Therefore, contract farming may not help achieve higher welfare goals for small broiler producers who actually instead seek alternative market opportunities that better realise their comparative advantages. 

Alternative splicing is a cellular mechanism in eukaryotes that results in considerable diversity of gene products. It plays an important role in several diseases and cellular signal regulation. Heat stress is a major factor that induces immunosuppression in pigs. Little is known about the correlation between alternative splicing and heat stress in pigs. Therefore, this study aimed to clone, sequence and quantify the alternative splicing variant of toll-like receptor 4 (TLR4) in Bama miniature pigs (Sus scrofa domestica) following exposure to heat stress. The results showed that the second exon of TLR4 was spliced and 167 bp shorter in the alternative splicing variant, and the protein was putatively identified as a type of truncated membrane protein consisting of extramembrane, transmembrane and intramembrane regions lacking a signal peptide. Further, it was not a nonclassical secretory protein. Five potential reference genes were screened for their potential as reliable standards to quantify the expression of TLR4 alternative spliced variants by real-time quantitative reverse-transcriptase polymerase chain reaction (qRT-PCR). The stability of these reference genes was ranked using the geNorm and NormFinder programs, and ribosomal protein L4 (RPL4) and TATA box-binding protein (TBP) were found to be the two genes showing the most stable expression in the in vitro cultured peripheral blood mononuclear cells (PBMCs) during heat shock. The mRNA level of the TLR4 gene (both classical and spliced) in stressed pigs increased significantly (P<0.05). Further, the expression levels of the alternative spliced variant of TLR4 (TLR4-ASV) showed a 2-3 folds increase in heat-stressed PBMCs as compared to control pigs. The results of the present study suggested that heat shock might modulate the host immune response by regulating the expressions of TLR4 and its alternative splicing variant.

The plasmid pGPDGFP under the control of pgpdA promotor was used together with vector pAN7-1 containing the hygromycin resistance cassette to co-transform protoplasts of HG1, Fusarium graminearum from Hubei Province, China. Twelve out of 14 hygromycin-resistant transformants showed green signal under the UV light and contained one or several copies of gfp, as indicated by Southern analysis of genomic DNA digested with different restriction enzymes and hybridized to the gfp probe. A single gfp copy transformant (HG1C5) was selected for further evaluation of 80 Chinese wheat cultivars or advanced lines. The results showed different resistance type to F. graminearum were observed. GFP signals observed in the rachis and adjacent spikes of 70 Chinese wheat lines such as Chuanchongzu 104 indicated both type I (host resistance to the initial infection by the fungus) and type II (resistance to the spread of FHB symptoms within an infected spike) were not observed. While other 10 lines showed type II resistance to F. graminearum with GFP signals only in inoculated spikelets. Development of the mycelium can be intuitively observed and the resistance of wheat to F. graminearum can be identified at 7 days post inoculation (dpi) in this way. The results showed no differences were evaluated between the transformed HG1C5 and the non-transgene artificial inoculation by SAS paired chi-square test and McNemar’s test (P=0.0625).