Abstract:Graphene is an emerging two-dimensional carbon nanomaterial with remarkable electronic, optical and mechanical properties, and therefore has been applied extensively in the field of electronic device, composites and energy storage. Recently, as a result of its superb and unique properties, graphene has already become the competitive candidate in the field of biomedicine including biosensor, cell imaging, drug delivery and antibacterial nanomaterials, which has led to important breakthroughs in biomedical technology and brought great benefits to human health. However, as graphene creeps in our lives along with its versatile applications, its potential threat to the biosafety of human and other creatures has come to the fore and drawn worldwide attention. Therefore, in this work, the impacts caused by graphene on biobodies and the advances in the interactions between graphene and biobodies along with its mechanisms were reviewed. Then various types of biobarriers protecting human body from the negative effects induced by graphene were summarized. In the end, some important research directions concerning the health risk of graphene were pointed out and future challenges in health risk of graphene needing to be resolved were brought up.

Abstract:Intrinsically disordered proteins (IDPs) do not shape into a stable and well-structured three-dimensional fold, while they are biologically active. The discovery of IDPs is in contradiction to the traditional "structure-function" relationship. In this review, the experimental and computational methods for the identification of IDPs, and the corresponding databases were summarized. Then, we introduce the structural features (including primary structure, secondary structure, disorder of protein domain and the allosteric effect) and functional features of IDPs. We also specially focused on the evolutionary researches of IDPs. The evolutionary mechanisms of the formation of IDPs and the evolutionary rates of disordered regions were described. And the important roles of IDPs' evolution in the evolution of biological function and the increasing of biological complexity were summarized. Finally, we discussed the prospects of IDPs in medical applications. This review is of great significance for the further understanding of IDPs' formation mechanism, structural and functional characteristics and their potential prospects in clinical application.

Abstract:Tip60 (KAT5), a member of MYST acetyltransferase family, is an important component of an evolutionarily conserved complex, NuA4. In the past ten years, a number of functions have been discovered for Tip60. It could act as transcriptional regulation factor together with or without nuclear receptors to activate or inhibit downstream gene expression; or acetylate a series of proteins to regulate their activity and stability. Through its acetyltransferase activity, Tip60 has been shown to regulate some important signaling pathways, such as DNA damage repair response, cell cycle, checkpoint activation, apoptosis, metabolism and autophagy. In addition, Tip60 also plays a crucial role in the development and metastasis of tumor and embryonic development. Here, we summarized the functions of Tip60 in recent years.

Abstract:Internet addiction (IA) as a behavioral addiction is currently becoming a serious mental health issue around the globe. According to the neurobiological model of brain development, exploring the neural mechanisms of reward seeking behavior and cognitive control in internet addicts may help in developing treatments for individuals with IA. Behavioral research has indicated that IA is commonly associated with enhanced reward sensitivity and decreased inhibitory control. Additionally, research focused on the neural mechanisms of IA indicates that deficits in the reward or cognitive control systems might be a high risk factor for addictive behaviors. Compared with substance addictions, IA, as a kind of psychological addiction, has a specific reward mechanism. While previous research has deepened the understanding of the psychological and neural mechanisms in IA, there still exist many issues surrounding diagnosis and treatment of IA: the screening criteria are not scientific; the classification is ambiguous; the effect of intervention and treatment is controversial; causal research is scarce; and research paradigms are flawed. Substantial future research is needed to explore, fully understand, and treat IA.

Abstract:The mesolimbic reward system, consisting, at its core, of the ventral tegmental area and its downstream targeting brain areas, has historically been investigated for its role in drug addiction and neuropsychological disorders. Award and aversion stimuli are two widely-used measurements in these pathological processes in animal studies. Huge divergence does exist in the responses of this system to award or aversive stimuli, and more and more studies tend to agree that the midbrain reward system, especially the dopaminergic neurons within the ventral tegmental area has great heterogenicity. Focusing on the identification criteria, anatomical location and projection-specification of dopaminergic neuron, this review summarized the heterogeneous responses to reward/aversion, and looked into the directions of future studies.

Abstract:Schizophrenia is a common mental disorder, the incidence of it in the whole life of Chinese is about 6.55‰. Exploring the language cognition is of great assistance in the diagnosis and therapy in schizophrenia. In this paper, the authors reviewed the advances of schizophrenia studies at behavioral and neural levels (event-related potentials (ERP)，functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS)). There were a battery of researches about schizophrenia in west countries using alphabetic language as their mother tongue, several theories about language impairment have been created. Particularly, the strong correlation between auditory hallucination and language processing related brain regions (Wernicke's area) was identified by many studies. However, the studies about Chinese schizophrenia are relatively rare since it started relatively later. The authors pointed out that it was greatly necessary to strengthen the researches of Chinese schizophrenia, not only for understanding the characteristics of language cognition of this disorder, but also for providing new scientific basis of diagnosis and therapy in the Chinese schizophrenia.

Abstract:During the surveying of indigenous bacterial diversity in Taklimakan Desert of Xinjiang of China, we obtained 10 isolates, which possess a capacity to grow on 0.1×Tryptic Soy Broth agar supplemented with 1000 mg/L ampicillin. These bacteria display extensive resistances to different β-lactam antibiotics. All of these isolates belong to Proteobacteria. Five of them were identified as the human opportunistic pathogen Stenotrophomonas matltophila. Four strains were closely related to Mesorhizobium amorphae. It is interesting to see that one isolate A-3-E^T showed low 16S rRNA gene sequence similarity (< 96.8%) to those of the recognized species. The results of polyphasic taxonomy showed the strain represents a novel species of the new genus, for which the name Paramesorhizobium desertii gen. nov., sp. nov. is proposed. Moreover, it was found that high concentrations of β-lactam antibiotics are not able to inhibit the growth of strain A-3-E^T. The novel bacterium grows well in the media containing 1000 mg/L of cefazolin or 250 mg/L of cefotaxime. The strain also resists 17 of the 28 tested antibiotics. We just presented a case that the Taklimakan Desert is a natural reservoir of novel β-Lactam antibiotic resistant bacteria.

Abstract:To investigate mechanism of migration and invasion effected by carboxyl terminal activating region 3 (CTAR₃) of Epstein-Barr virus encoded latent membrane protein 1(LMP1) in nasopharyngeal carcinoma stem cell SP18 cells, the SP18 cell of stable expressed LMP1 and deletion mutant type LMP1 (LMP1^△232-351) were established (SP18-LMP1 and SP18-LMP1^△252-351). The effect of LMP1-CTAR₃ deletion mutant for cellular proliferation, migration and invasion were observed in SP18 cells. The differential expression genes between SP18-LMP1 and SP18-LMP1^△252-351 cells were analyzed by cDNA chips, and the expression levels of partial identified genes were verified by fluorescent Real-time quantitative RT-PCR. The relation of differential expression genes were analyzed by bioinformatics. The results showed: (1) The ability of LMP1^△232-351 promoting SP18 cell proliferation, migration and invasion was obviously decreased to compare with wild type LMP1(n=3, P < 0.05). (2) 18 genes, 13 up- and 5 down-regulated ones, of LMP1-CTAR₃ mediated regulation with migration and invasion were identified from in SP18 cell lines. The differential expression of partial identified genes was similar with cDNA chips separated ones and confirmed by fluorescent Real-time quantitative RT-PCR. (3) 13 differential expression genes can be cross-talk, and among FN1, MMP14, ITGA2, THBS1, IL1B and IL6 genes were frequently correlation. These results suggested that LMP1-CTAR₃ probably regulates the expression of FN1, MMP14, ITGA2, THBS1, IL1B and IL6 genes to induce and promote migration and invasion of nasopharyngeal carcinoma stem cell SP18 cell.

Abstract:A lot of researches suggest that there are transcriptional regulatory elements in the first introns of genes. However, the ways about introns participating in transcriptional regulation are not still understood. In this paper, we extracted combinatorial transcriptional regulatory motifs in regions from upstream sequences to the first introns in human housekeeping (HK) genes by statistical methods, analyzed the characteristics of distances and locations of motifs, and discussed the potential and ways of introns involving in transcriptional regulation. 960 potential transcriptional regulatory motif pairs are extracted in HK genes, and 57% of them are in accordance with 12 known interacting transcription factor pairs. The location preferences of the over-represented motif pairs have been studied. The results show that about 80% and 90% of the motif pairs in HK genes occur in upstream-upstream and upstream-intron regions, respectively. This results further support the conjecture of the introns could participate in transcriptional regulation of genes, and it was speculated that there are transcriptional synergism between introns and upstream promoter. Extracting motifs are mainly focus on vicinity of transcriptional start sites (TSSs), and the space distance between two motifs in one motif pairs is short. The preference analyses on distance of the motif pairs show that 60% of the motif pairs in HK genes are shorter than 200 bp, and 65% of characteristic distances are within 100 bp. This is conductive for synergism of transcription factors. These results will be helpful for understanding the mechanisms of the transcriptional regulation for HK genes in human.

Abstract:Label-free quantitative approach based mass spectrometry was used for analysis of complex proteomes, meanwhile, a method based on quantitative analysis which is used for explaining functions and interactions in a large-scale manner is of great importance. To systematically overcome this challenge, we should build a method combing with quantitation and qualification. We used Normalized Spectral Abundance Factor (NSAF) based peptide count as starting point for our analysis and proposed a new method with shared peptides to accurately evaluate abundance of Isoforms for complex proteomes. In addition, large-scale functional annotations of complex proteomes were extracted by g:Profiler and analyzed in the process of quantitation. In this paper, three groups of mitochondrial proteins including mouse heart mitochondrial proteins, mouse liver mitochondrial proteins and human heart mitochondrial proteins were selected for analysis. All MS/MS spectra t were searched against the IPI mouse database and IPI human database using the pFind software kit. Detailed search parameters were performed using as follows: partial tryptic digest allowing two missed cleavages; fixed modification of cysteine with carbamidomethylation (57.021 Da) and variable modification of methionine with oxidation (15.995 Da), the precursor and fragment mass tolerances were set up at 1.5 and 0.5 Da, respectively. Peptides matching the following criteria were used for protein identification: DeltaCN≥0.1; FDR≤1.0%; peptide mass was 600.0～6000.0; peptide length was 6～60. According to the biochemical properties of mitochondrial proteins, all functional annotations were assigned to various signaling pathway or functional clusters, such as apoptosis, DNA/RNA/protein synthesis, metabolism, oxidative phosphorylation, protein binding/folding, proteolysis, redox, signal transduction, structure, transport, cell adhesion and cell cycle, and analyzed by correlation analysis, functional clustering and electron transport chain analysis. We found that proteins which rank have enormous variation between NSAF and the new method even came from a same family, such as proteins belonging to acyl-CoA dehydrogenase family. Proteins in the family play an important role in life event due to their biochemical properties of fatty acid metabolism and lipid metabolism searched using the online database analysis tool available through UniProt (www.uniprot.org). From the global perspective of the three groups of mitochondrial proteins, the correlation of mouse heart mitochondrial proteins and mouse liver mitochondrial proteins shows highest, while the correlation of human heart mitochondrial proteins and mouse liver mitochondrial proteins shows lowest, it denotes that the correlation of simple species and different organs shows highest. On the aspect of functional clustering, metabolic proteins have highest abundance in mouse liver mitochondrial dataset, while oxidative phosphorylation proteins show highest abundance in cardiac mitochondrial dataset. This explains that liver plays an important role in metabolic process including nutrients synthesis, transformation and decomposition, however, heart promotes blood flowing to provide adequate blood to the organs or tissues, supply oxygen or various nutrients and take metabolic products away. We concluded that the strategy with shared peptides overcame inaccurate and overestimated results to improve accuracy, and label-free quantitative approach coupled with complex proteome functional analysis can thoroughly explore protein functions or relationship and provide a new method for large-scale comparative or diseased proteomics.