Reintroduction is a key approach in the conservation of endangered species. In recent decades, many reintroduction projects have been conducted for conservation purposes, but the rate of success has been low. Given the important role of gut microbiota in health and diseases, we questioned whether gut microbiota would play a crucial role in giant panda's wild‐training process. The wild procedure is when captive‐born babies live with their mothers in a wilderness enclosure and learn wilderness...

The single-index models (SIMs) provide an efficient way of coping with high-dimensional nonparametric estimation problems and avoid the “curse of dimensionality.” Many existing estimation procedures for SIMs were built on least square loss, which is popular for its mathematical beauty but is non-robust to non-normal errors and outliers. This article addressed the question of both robustness and efficiency of estimation methods based on a new data-driven weighted linear combination of convex loss functions instead of...

Tigecycline is one of the last-resort antibiotics to treat severe infections. Recently, tigecycline resistance has sporadically emerged with an increasing trend, and Tet(X) family represents a new resistance mechanism of tigecycline. In this study, a novel chromosome-encoded tigecycline resistance gene, tet(X14), was identified in a tigecycline-resistant and colistin-resistant Empedobacter stercoris strain ES183 recovered from a pig fecal sample in China. Tet(X14) shows 67.14-96.39% sequence identity to the other variants [Tet(X) to Tet(X13)]. Overexpression of Tet(X14)...

SETX (senataxin) is an RNA/DNA helicase that has been implicated in transcriptional regulation and the DNA damage response through resolution of R-loop structures. Mutations in SETX result in either of two distinct neurodegenerative disorders. SETX dominant mutations result in a juvenile form of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) called ALS4, whereas recessive mutations are responsible for ataxia called ataxia with oculomotor apraxia type 2 (AOA2). How mutations in the same protein can lead to different phenotypes...

Acinetobacter baumannii has become a major healthcare threat that causes nosocomial infections, especially in critically ill patients. The spread of carbapenem-resistant A. baumannii (CRAB) strains has long been a clinical concern. It is important to study the epidemiology and virulence characteristics of different CRAB isolates in order to tailor infection prevention and antibiotic prescribing. In this study, a total of 71 CRAB isolates were collected in the hospital, and clinical characteristics of infections were analyzed....

Polyamines are small, polycationic molecules with a hydrocarbon backbone and multiple amino groups required for optimal cell growth. The potD gene, belonging to the ABC (ATP-binding cassette) transport system potABCD, encodes the bacterial substrate-binding subunit of the polyamine transport system, playing a pivotal role in bacterial metabolism and growth. The swine pathogen Glaesserella parasuis possesses an intact pot operon, and the studies presented here mainly examined the involvement of PotD in Glaesserella pathogenesis. A potD-deficient...

Objective: Synaptic degeneration is the pathologic foundation of cognitive decline in the Alzheimer’s disease (AD) continuum. We aimed to determine whether cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) synaptic marker neurogranin (Ng) is a disease state or a disease stage biomarker in the AD continuum. Methods: Studies comparing CSF Ng levels among AD, mild cognitive impairment (MCI) and healthy participants were included. Studies were eligible if the correlation between CSF Ng levels and Mini-Mental Status Examination (MMSE) scores was...

New SARS-CoV-2 mutants have been continuously indentified with enhanced transmission ever since its outbreak in early 2020. As an RNA virus, SARS-CoV-2 has a high mutation rate due to the low fidelity of RNA polymerase. To study the single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) dynamics of SARS-CoV-2, 158 SNPs with high confidence were identified by deep meta-transcriptomic sequencing, and the most common SNP type was C > T. Analyses of intra-host population diversity revealed that intra-host quasispecies’...

Pekin ducks are world-famous for its fast growth and have become the majority of breeds rearing in duck industry. Feed conversion ratio (FCR) is an important trait in Pekin ducks breeding and production, and the underlying biological processes are complex. To gain an insight to the possible biological mechanism underlying the FCR in Pekin ducks, an artificial selection population (S) and a natural population (Z7) were used in this study. The FCR of S line...

Pekin ducks are world-famous for its fast growth and have become the majority of breeds rearing in duck industry. Feed conversion ratio (FCR) is an important trait in Pekin ducks breeding and production, and the underlying biological processes are complex. To gain an insight to the possible biological mechanism underlying the FCR in Pekin ducks, an artificial selection population (S) and a natural population (Z7) were used in this study. The FCR of S line...

A keloid is defined as an overgrowth of the dense fibrous tissues that form around a wound. Since they destroy the vascular network, keloid tissues often exhibit anoxic conditions. Hypoxia-inducible factor-1α (HIF-1α) is a core factor that mediates hypoxia stress responses and regulates the hypoxic cellular and biological behaviors. In this study, we found that the expression level of HIF-1α in keloid tissue was significantly higher than that in the normal skin tissue. Hypoxia-induced HIF-1α...

We, the Editors and Publisher of the journal Cell Cycle, have retracted the following article: Hao Gao, Xiaofeng Li, Guangxi Zhan, Yong Zhu, Jing Yu, Jiapo Wang, Li Li, Weimin Wu, Na Liu and Xiaoqing Guo. Long noncoding RNA MAGI1-IT1 promoted invasion and metastasis of epithelial ovarian cancer via the miR-200a/ZEB axis. Cell Cycle. 2019;18(12):1393-1406. doi: 10.1080/15384101.2019.1618121 Since publication, concerns have been raised about the integrity of the data in the article. When approached for...

The Liaodong gold province includes voluminous gold deposits, which occur in an Archean gneiss complex, Paleoproterozoic metamorphic rocks, and Mesozoic granite. However, the ore-forming age, the genesis, and the geodynamic setting of the gold deposits are not well constrained. In this study, we have summarized previous geochronology data, H-O-S-Pb isotopes, and He-Ar isotopic compositions of the gold deposits. Based on geochronology data, the gold mineralization was divided into Late Triassic, Early Jurassic, and Early Cretaceous....

Additional file 8: Table S5. Sequence of primers used in this study.

Circular RNAs (circRNAs) are closely associated with cancer development in glioblastoma (GBM), and this study aims to explore the molecular mechanisms of a novel circular RNA circZNF652 in regulating GBM aggressiveness. The present study found that CircZNF652 and SERPINE1 were upregulated, while miR-486-5p was downregulated in GBM tissues and cell lines, and GBM patients with high expression of CircZNF652 and SERPINE1, and patients with low expression of miR-486-5p tended to have a worse prognosis. Further...

Pumpkin is one of the region’s main cashcrops in northeast China cultivated for its edible seed and sarcocarp. Gummy stem blight (GSB), caused by the main pathogenic fungus of Stagonosporopsis cucurbitacearum (Sc.) which was identified in our previous study, has hampered pumpkin industry development with the affection of its reduced biological yield and edible quality. To clear the plant immune response mechanisms against Sc. infection, RNA-seq technology was employed to sequence pumpkin leaf transcriptome, the...

Heat stress is an environmental challenge that reduces plant productivity and growth. Plants have developed corresponding mechanisms to survive this adverse environmental stress. To demonstrate the mechanisms of how plants adapt to the environmental challenge, the heat response experiments involving Arabidopsis thaliana were retrieved from the GEO database. After quantile normalization of the GEO raw data, the differentially expressed genes (DEGs) in response to heat stress were identified by robust rank aggregation (RRA) algorithm, including...

Osteosarcoma (OS), the most prevalent bone malignancy, mainly affects children and adolescents. Despite recent advances in multimodal therapy, the overall survival rate for OS patients remains poor. Chinese herb medicine (CHM) is an alternative therapeutic option for multifaceted diseases such as malignant tumors. For centuries in China, polygonum cuspidatum, a classic CHM, has been used to treat several diseases, nevertheless, the mechanisms underlying its therapeutic effects have not been fully elucidated. Through network pharmacology and...

Amino acids play crucial roles in the MTOR (mechanistic target of rapamycin kinase) complex 1 (MTORC1) pathway. However, the underlying mechanisms are not fully understood. Here, we establish a cell-free system to mimic the activation of MTORC1, by which we identify CANX (calnexin) as an essential regulator for leucine-stimulated MTORC1 pathway. CANX translocates to lysosomes after leucine deprivation, and its loss of function renders either the MTORC1 activity or the lysosomal translocation of MTOR insensitive...

Macroautophagy/autophagy is a conserved cellular mechanism to degrade unneeded cytoplasmic proteins and organelles to recycle their components, and it is critical for embryonic stem cell (ESC) self-renewal and somatic cell reprogramming. Whereas autophagy is essential for early development of embryos, no information exists regarding its functions during the transition from naive-to-primed pluripotency. Here, by using an in vitro transition model of ESCs to epiblast-like cells (EpiLCs), we find that dynamic changes in ATG7-dependent autophagy are...

Liver injury from any number of causes (e.g. chemical material, drugs and diet, viral infection) is a global health problem, and its mechanism is not clearly understood. MicroRNAs (miRNAs) expression profiling is gaining popularity because miRNAs, as key regulators in gene expression networks, can influence many biological processes and have also shown promise as biomarkers for disease. Previous studies reported the regulation effects of miRNAs in liver injury, whereas function and molecular mechanisms of miR-322-5p...

Considering the determining role of TGFβ signaling in the tumor microenvironment (TME) on immune evasion, the inhibition of signaling is expected to enhance the therapeutic efficacy of immunotherapies, especially immune checkpoint blockade (ICB), which is confirmed in preclinical data. However, successive failures in clinical translation occur at the initial stage. To provide a better understanding of TGFβ signaling within the TME and its relation to the individual immunological status, we performed a pan-cancer analysis comparing...

Layered double hydroxides (LDHs) and LDHs-derived materials are emerging as potential engineered adsorbents for the protection of water environment. Particularly, LDHs intercalated with different guest compounds (GC-LDHs), which differ from traditional interlayer anions (such as Cl−, SO42−, NO3−, CO32−, and PO43−), are widely reported by recent studies showing their promising multifunctional roles in water purification. Herein, this review systematically presents the synthesis methods and characterization techniques of GC-LDHs and their application as adsorbents in removing...

The domestic yak was regarded as a valuable model to explore the molecular mechanism of high-altitude animal adaptation, including the extreme tolerance of starvation and cold stress, which is closely associated with specifically seasonal deposition and metabolism of subcutaneous adipose tissue. However, the key regulators for these processes remain largely unknown. Here, the yak adipogenesis model in vitro was established and liver kinase b1 (LKB1) was regarded as a key negative regulator involved in yak...

1. The following study examined the expression profiles of the receptor tyrosine kinases (RTK) family in the developing feather follicles of Pekin ducks and Nonghua ducks at 6-9 weeks of age. The RTK subfamilies related to feather development were summarised, and other candidate genes related to feather development were enriched. 2. To reveal the potential role of all RTK members in feather development, the feather follicles of two duck breeds (Pekin and Nonghua ducks) at...