Breathing as one of the components of biathlon shooting in youth biathletes

PURPOSE: This study is aimed at identifying the length of breath holding in youth biathletes before shooting in both the prone and the standing position, and determining potential dependence between breath holding and the shooting performance at rest and after physical load during the training period.METHODS: Twenty-one national youth biathletes, women (n = 10; 16.7 ± 0.7 years) and men (n = 11; 16.5 ± 0.6 years), participated in the study. All participants completed two series of measuring of breath holding after 3 months period during shooting at rest and after roller skiing in a race load, in the prone as well as the standing position. They shot using their own biathlon rifles with a fixed accelerometer and respiration belts on the thorax.RESULTS: The average length of breath holding when successfully hitting the target in the prone position was 0.65 seconds in average both at rest and in the racing load, with some significant differences both men and women. When shooting in the standing position, the average values were approximately same as in the prone position 0.65 seconds both at rest and in racing load, again with some observable differences both men and women. There were several significant differences between the pre-test and post-test in the length of breath holding in both groups (p < 0.05).CONCLUSIONS:The study evaluate the length of breath holding and determine dependence of breath holding on the shooting performance at rest and after physical load during the training period in youth biathletes. The comparison of the acquired information with the shooting methodology taught by the coaches brought beneficial results. The study showed that is appropriate to hold breath for an average of 0.55 - 0.7 seconds in both shooting positions for both men and women in this age category.

Can we identify wild-born salmon from parentage assignment data? A case study in the Garonne-Dordogne rivers salmon restoration programme in France

Parentage assignment with genomic markers provides an opportunity to monitor salmon restocking programs. Most of the time, it is used to study the fate of hatchery-born fish in those programs, as well as the genetic impacts of restocking. In such analyses, only fish that are assigned to their parents are considered. In the Garonne-Dordogne river basin in France, native salmon have disappeared, and supportive breeding is being used to try to reinstate a self-sustained population. It is therefore of primary importance to assess the numbers of wild-born returning salmon, which could appear as wrongly assigned or not assigned, depending on the power of the marker set and on the size of the mating plan. We used the genotypes at nine microsatellites of the 5800 hatchery broodstock which were used from 2008 to 2014, and of 884 upstream migrating fish collected from 2008 to 2016, to assess our ability to identify wild-born salmon. We simulated genotypes of hatchery fish and wild-born fish and assessed how they were identified by the parentage assignment software Accurassign. We showed that 98.7% of the fish assigned within the recorded mating plan could be considered hatchery fish, while 93.3% of the fish in other assignment categories (assigned out of the mating plan, assigned to several parent pairs, not assigned) could be considered wild-born. Using a Bayesian approach, we showed that 31.3% of the 457 upstream migrating fish sampled from 2014 to 2016 were wild-born. This approach is thus efficient to identify wild-born fish in a restoration program. It remains dependent on the quality of the recording of the mating plan, which we showed was rather good (<5% mistakes) in this program. To limit this potential dependence, an increase in the number of markers genotyped (17 instead of 9) is now being implemented.

Potential dependence of the ionic structure at the ionic liquid/water interface studied using MD simulation

The structure at the electrochemical liquid/liquid interface between water (W) and trioctylmethylammonium bis (nonafluorobutanesulfonyl)amide, a hydrophobic ionic liquid (IL), was studied using molecular dynamics (MD) simulation in which the interfacial...