On the evolutionary trail of MagRs.

Magnetic sense, or termed magnetoreception, has evolved in a broad range of taxa within the animal kingdom to facilitate orientation and navigation. MagRs, highly conserved A-type iron-sulfur proteins, are widely distributed across all phyla and play essential roles in both magnetoreception and iron-sulfur cluster biogenesis. However, the evolutionary origins and functional diversification of MagRs from their prokaryotic ancestor remain unclear.

Evolution of olfactory receptor superfamily in bats based on high throughput molecular modelling.

The origin of flight and laryngeal echolocation in bats is likely to have been accompanied by evolutionary changes in other aspects of their sensory biology. Of all sensory modalities in bats, olfaction is perhaps the least well understood. Olfactory receptors (ORs) function in recognizing odour molecules, with crucial roles in evaluating food, as well as in processing social information.

Structural, static, and dynamic functional MRI predictors for conversion from mild cognitive impairment to Alzheimer's disease: Inter-cohort validation of Shanghai Memory Study and ADNI.

Mild cognitive impairment (MCI) is a critical prodromal stage of Alzheimer's disease (AD), and the mechanism underlying the conversion is not fully explored. Construction and inter-cohort validation of imaging biomarkers for predicting MCI conversion is of great challenge at present, due to lack of longitudinal cohorts and poor reproducibility of various study-specific imaging indices. We proposed a novel framework for inter-cohort MCI conversion prediction, involving comparison of structural, static, and dynamic functional brain features from structural magnetic resonance imaging (sMRI) and resting-state functional MRI (fMRI) between MCI converters (MCI_C) and non-converters (MCI_NC), and support vector machine for construction of prediction models.

How genomic insights into the evolutionary history of clouded leopards inform their conservation.

Clouded leopards ( spp.), a morphologically and ecologically distinct lineage of big cats, are severely threatened by habitat loss and fragmentation, targeted hunting, and other human activities. The long-held poor understanding of their genetics and evolution has undermined the effectiveness of conservation actions.

iORbase: A database for the prediction of the structures and functions of insect olfactory receptors.

Insect olfactory receptors (iORs) with atypical 7-transmembrane domains, unlike Chordata olfactory receptors, are not in the GPCR protein family. iORs selectively bind to volatile ligands in the environment and affect essential insect behaviors. In this study, we constructed a new platform (iORbase, https://www.

Decreased Retinal Vascular Density in Alzheimer's Disease (AD) and Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI): An Optical Coherence Tomography Angiography (OCTA) Study.

Background: To explore the retinal vascular density changes in Alzheimer's disease (AD) and mild cognitive impairment (MCI) patients using optical coherence tomography angiography (OCTA).

Methods: We recruit 62 AD patients, 47 MCI patients, and 49 cognitively healthy controls (HC) in this study. All participants in the study received a comprehensive ophthalmological and neurological evaluation, including global cognitive screening, as well as the Mini-Mental State Examination (MMSE), and completed the following eye examinations: visual acuity (VA), intraocular pressure (IOP), examination with slit-lamp, fundus photography (Version 1.

Comparative mitochondrial genomes of four species of and phylogenetic implications (Orthoptera, Melanoplinae).

In this study, the whole mitochondrial genomes (mitogenomes) from four species were sequenced. The complete mitochondrial genomes of , , , and are 15,857 bp, 15,818 bp, 15,843 bp, and 15,872 bp in size, respectively. The 13 protein-coding genes (PCGs) begin with typical ATN codons, except for COXI in , which begins with ACC.

Associations of [F]-APN-1607 Tau PET Binding in the Brain of Alzheimer's Disease Patients With Cognition and Glucose Metabolism.

Molecular imaging of tauopathies is complicated by the differing specificities and off-target binding properties of available radioligands for positron emission tomography (PET). [F]-APN-1607 ([F]-PM-PBB3) is a newly developed PET tracer with promising properties for tau imaging. We aimed to characterize the cerebral binding of [F]-APN-1607 in Alzheimer's disease (AD) patients compared to normal control (NC) subjects.

The Evolution History of Fe-S Cluster A-Type Assembly Protein Reveals Multiple Gene Duplication Events and Essential Protein Motifs.

Iron-sulfur (Fe-S) clusters play important roles in electron transfer, metabolic and biosynthetic reactions, and the regulation of gene expression. Understanding the biogenesis of Fe-S clusters is therefore relevant to many fields. In the complex process of Fe-S protein formation, the A-type assembly protein (ATAP) family, which consists of several subfamilies, plays an essential role in Fe-S cluster formation and transfer and is highly conserved across the tree of life.

Predicting combinative drug pairs via multiple classifier system with positive samples only.

Background And Objective: Due to the synergistic effects of drugs, drug combination is one of the effective approaches for treating complex diseases. However, the identification of drug combinations by dose-response methods is still costly. It is promising to develop supervised learning-based approaches to predict potential drug combinations on a large scale.

Effects of large gradient high magnetic field (LG-HMF) on the long-term culture of aquatic organisms: Planarians example.

Large gradient high magnetic field (LG-HMF) is a powerful tool to study the effects of altered gravity on organisms. In our study, a platform for the long-term culture of aquatic organisms was designed based on a special superconducting magnet with an LG-HMF, which can provide three apparent gravity levels (µ g, 1 g, and 2 g), along with a control condition on the ground. Planarians, Dugesia japonica, were head-amputated and cultured for 5 days in a platform for head reconstruction.

Ligand-binding characterization of simulated β-adrenergic-like octopamine receptor in Schistocerca gregaria via progressive structure simulation.

It is important to design insecticides having both low drug resistance and less undesirable toxicity for desert locust control. Specific GPCRs of Schistocerca gregaria, especially β-adrenergic-like octopamine receptor (SgOctβR), can be considered as its potential effective insecticide targets. However, either the unavailability of SgOctβR's structure or the inadequate capability of its sequence lead the development of insecticide for Schistocerca gregaria meets its plateau.

Measurement of contact angles in a simulated microgravity environment generated by a large gradient magnetic field.

The contact angle is an important parameter that is essential for studying interfacial phenomena. The contact angle can be measured using commercially available instruments. However, these well-developed instruments may not function or may be unsuitable for use in some special environments.

Predicting existing targets for new drugs base on strategies for missing interactions.

Background: There has been paid more and more attention to supervised classification models in the area of predicting drug-target interactions (DTIs). However, in terms of classification, unavoidable missing DTIs in data would cause three issues which have not yet been addressed appropriately by former approaches. Directly labeled as negatives (non-DTIs), missing DTIs increase the confusion of positives (DTIs) and negatives, aggravate the imbalance between few positives and many negatives, and are usually discriminated as highly-scored false positives, which influence the existing measures sharply.

A Systematic Analysis of the Structures of Heterologously Expressed Proteins and Those from Their Native Hosts in the RCSB PDB Archive.

Recombinant expression of proteins has become an indispensable tool in modern day research. The large yields of recombinantly expressed proteins accelerate the structural and functional characterization of proteins. Nevertheless, there are literature reported that the recombinant proteins show some differences in structure and function as compared with the native ones.

De Novo Assembly and Characterization of the Transcriptome of Grasshopper Shirakiacris shirakii.

Background: The grasshopper Shirakiacris shirakii is an important agricultural pest and feeds mainly on gramineous plants, thereby causing economic damage to a wide range of crops. However, genomic information on this species is extremely limited thus far, and transcriptome data relevant to insecticide resistance and pest control are also not available.

Methods: The transcriptome of S.

Characterization and analysis of a de novo transcriptome from the pygmy grasshopper Tetrix japonica.

The pygmy grasshopper Tetrix japonica is a common insect distributed throughout the world, and it has the potential for use in studies of body colour polymorphism, genomics and the biology of Tetrigoidea (Insecta: Orthoptera). However, limited biological information is available for this insect. Here, we conducted a de novo transcriptome study of adult and larval T.

[Progresses in predicting the crystallizability of proteins].

Determination of protein 3-dimensional structure offers very important information in biology researches, especially for understanding protein functions and redundant drug design. The X-ray crystallography is still the main technique for protein structure determination. Obtaining protein crystals is an essential procedure after protein purification in this technique.

A quality comparison of protein crystals grown under containerless conditions generated by diamagnetic levitation, silicone oil and agarose gel.

High-quality crystals are key to obtaining accurate three-dimensional structures of proteins using X-ray diffraction techniques. However, obtaining such protein crystals is often a challenge. Several containerless crystallization techniques have been reported to have the ability to improve crystal quality, but it is unknown which is the most favourable way to grow high-quality protein crystals.

Correlation between protein sequence similarity and crystallization reagents in the biological macromolecule crystallization database.

The protein structural entries grew far slower than the sequence entries. This is partly due to the bottleneck in obtaining diffraction quality protein crystals for structural determination using X-ray crystallography. The first step to achieve protein crystallization is to find out suitable chemical reagents.

[Expression of human aspartyl beta-hydroxylase and preparation of its monoclonal antibody].

We investigated the mechanism of human aspartyl beta-hydroxylase (HAAH) in early diagnosis of tumors. The encoding gene of HAAH was cloned from the hepatic carcinoma by RT-PCR and expressed as a fused protein in the prokaryotic vector pBV-IL1. The expressed HAAH was purified by Ni(2+)-NTA purification column and the purified protein was then used to immunize Balb/c mice.

[Investigations of drug addiction mechanism in planarians].

Drug abuse harms people's health and lead to a series of economic, social and political problems. However, the problems of physical damage, physical dependence and withdrawal syndrome caused by drug abuse still exist. Planarians have been a new animal experimental model in vivo for neuropharmacology, because they possess a primitive central nervous system and neurotransmitter systems similarly to mammalians.