Publications by authors named "Huai-qiang Ju"

Background And Objective: Gastric cancer (GC) remains a prevalent and preventable disease, yet accurate early diagnostic methods are lacking. Exosome non-coding RNAs (ncRNAs), a type of liquid biopsy, have emerged as promising diagnostic biomarkers for various tumours. This study aimed to identify a serum exosome ncRNA feature for enhancing GC diagnosis.

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Metabolic enzymes perform moonlighting functions during tumor progression, including the modulation of chemoresistance. However, the underlying mechanisms of these functions remain elusive. Here, utilizing a metabolic clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats (CRISPR)-Cas9 knockout library screen, we observe that the loss of glutamate-cysteine ligase modifier subunit (GCLM), a rate-limiting enzyme in glutathione biosynthesis, noticeably increases the sensitivity of colorectal cancer (CRC) cells to platinum-based chemotherapy.

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Background: Most Colorectal Cancer (CRC) patients exhibit limited responsiveness to anti-programmed cell death protein 1 (PD-1) therapy, with the underlying mechanisms remaining elusive. Circular RNAs (circRNAs) play a significant role in tumorigenesis and development, with potential applications in tumor screening and predicting treatment efficacy. However, there are few studies exploring the role of circRNAs in CRC immune evasion.

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Early detection is warranted to improve prognosis of gastric cancer (GC) but remains challenging. Liquid biopsy combined with machine learning will provide new insights into diagnostic strategies of GC. Lipid metabolism reprogramming plays a crucial role in the initiation and development of tumors.

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RNA methylation is an important regulatory process to determine immune cell function but how it affects the anti-tumor activity of CD8 T cells is not fully understood. Here we show that the N-methyladenosine (mA) RNA reader YTHDF2 is highly expressed in early effector or effector-like CD8 T cells. We find that YTHDF2 facilitates nascent RNA synthesis, and mA recognition is fundamental for this distinctively nuclear function of the protein, which also reinforces its autoregulation at the RNA level.

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Article Synopsis
  • Inflammatory signals cause circulating monocytes to migrate and transform into pro-inflammatory macrophages, which can contribute to disease progression; researchers are exploring if blocking these monocytes can help.
  • Monocyte-derived macrophages (mo-macs) are found to be the primary type of immunosuppressive macrophages associated with liver metastases, while the usual liver-resident macrophages (Kupffer cells) are less common in these tumors.
  • Even though removing mo-macs leads to a slight decrease in these liver metastasis-associated macrophages (LMAMs), it also triggers local macrophage growth and the recruitment of Kupffer cells, suggesting that targeting both monocyte recruitment and macrophage growth could create a more favorable immune environment against cancer
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As the most abundant post-transcriptional modification in eukaryotes, N-methyladenosine (mA) plays a crucial role in cancer cell proliferation, invasion and chemoresistance. However, its specific effects on chemosensitivity to oxaliplatin-based regimens and the impact of these drugs on mA methylation levels in colorectal cancer (CRC) remain largely unexplored. In this study, we demonstrated that the mA methyltransferase Wilms tumor 1-associating protein (WTAP) weakens oxaliplatin chemosensitivity in HCT116 and DLD1 cells.

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Colorectal cancer (CRC) ranks as the third most common cancer and the second leading cause of cancer-related deaths. According to clinical diagnosis and treatment, liver metastasis occurs in approximately 50 % of CRC patients, indicating a poor prognosis. The unique immune tolerance of the liver fosters an immunosuppressive tumor microenvironment (TME).

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Abnormal iron metabolism has long been regarded as a key metabolic hallmark of cancer. As a critical cofactor, iron contributes to tumor progression by participating in various processes such as mitochondrial electron transport, gene regulation, and DNA synthesis or repair. Although the role of iron in tumor cells has been widely studied, recent studies have uncovered the interplay of iron metabolism between tumor cells and immune cells, which may affect both innate and adaptive immune responses.

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Colorectal cancer (CRC) patients with liver metastases usually obtain less benefit from immunotherapy, and the underlying mechanisms remain understudied. Here, we identify that fibrinogen-like protein 1 (FGL1), secreted from cancer cells and hepatocytes, facilitates the progression of CRC in an intraportal injection model by reducing the infiltration of T cells. Mechanistically, tumor-associated macrophages (TAMs) activate NF-ĸB by secreting TNFα/IL-1β in the liver microenvironment and transcriptionally upregulate OTU deubiquitinase 1 (OTUD1) expression, which enhances FGL1 stability via deubiquitination.

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The Hippo pathway is known for its crucial involvement in development, regeneration, organ size control, and cancer. While energy stress is known to activate the Hippo pathway and inhibit its effector YAP, the precise role of the Hippo pathway in energy stress response remains unclear. Here, we report a YAP-independent function of the Hippo pathway in facilitating autophagy and cell survival in response to energy stress, a process mediated by its upstream components MAP4K2 and STRIPAK.

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Interleukin-1β (IL-1β) is a key protein in inflammation and contributes to tumor progression. However, the role of IL-1β in cancer is ambiguous or even contradictory. Here, we found that upon IL-1β stimulation, nicotinamide nucleotide transhydrogenase (NNT) in cancer cells is acetylated at lysine (K) 1042 (NNT K1042ac) and thereby induces the mitochondrial translocation of p300/CBP-associated factor (PCAF).

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Iron metabolism dysregulation is tightly associated with cancer development. But the underlying mechanisms remain poorly understood. Increasing evidence has shown that long noncoding RNAs (lncRNAs) participate in various metabolic processes via integrating signaling pathway.

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Although chemotherapy plus PD-1 blockade (chemo+anti-PD-1) has become the standard first-line therapy for advanced esophageal squamous cell carcinoma (ESCC), reliable biomarkers for this regimen are lacking. Here we perform whole-exome sequencing on tumor samples from 486 patients of the JUPITER-06 study and develop a copy number alteration-corrected tumor mutational burden that depicts immunogenicity more precisely and predicts chemo+anti-PD-1 efficacy. We identify several other favorable immunogenic features (e.

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Membrane-based cells are the fundamental structural and functional units of organisms, while evidences demonstrate that liquid-liquid phase separation (LLPS) is associated with the formation of membraneless organelles, such as P-bodies, nucleoli and stress granules. Many studies have been undertaken to explore the functions of protein phase separation (PS), but these studies lacked an effective tool to identify the sequence segments that critical for LLPS. In this study, we presented a novel software called dSCOPE (http://dscope.

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Aberrant glucose metabolism is one of the most striking characteristics of metabolic reprogramming in cancer. Thus, clarifying the regulatory mechanism of glucose metabolism is crucial to understanding tumor progression and developing novel therapeutic strategies for cancer patients. Recent developments in circular RNAs have explained the regulatory mechanism of glucose metabolism from a new dimension.

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Secretion of TNFα by tumor-associated macrophages stimulates cancer cells to upregulate lncRNA MALR, which induces ILF3 liquid-liquid phase separation and activation of HIF1α signaling to promote cancer progression.

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Aims: This study aimed to identify mechanisms of drug resistance to the combination of vemurafenib, irinotecan, and cetuximab (VIC) in BRAF metastatic colorectal cancer (mCRC).

Methods: Forty-one patients with BRAF mCRC from July 2018 and June 2020 were evaluated, with tissue and/or plasma samples collected. We profiled tissue and plasma samples using whole-exome sequencing and targeted sequencing of 425 cancer-relevant genes.

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Cholesterol contributes to the structural basis of biological membranes and functions as a signaling molecule, whose dysregulation has been associated with various human diseases. Here, we report that the long non-coding RNA (lncRNA) SNHG6 increases progression from non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) to hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) by modulating cholesterol-induced mTORC1 activation. Mechanistically, cholesterol binds ER-anchored FAF2 protein to promote the formation of a SNHG6-FAF2-mTOR complex.

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Objective: Methionine metabolism is involved in a myriad of cellular functions, including methylation reactions and redox maintenance. Nevertheless, it remains unclear whether methionine metabolism, RNA methylation and antitumour immunity are molecularly intertwined.

Design: The antitumour immunity effect of methionine-restricted diet (MRD) feeding was assessed in murine models.

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Metastasis accounts for the major cause of cancer-related mortality. How disseminated tumor cells survive under suspension conditions and avoid anoikis is largely unknown. Here, using a metabolic enzyme-centered CRISPR-Cas9 genetic screen, we identified methylenetetrahydrofolate dehydrogenase, cyclohydrolase and formyltetrahydrofolate synthetase 1 (MTHFD1) as a novel suppressor of anoikis.

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