Publications by authors named "Simo Zhang"

Importance: Patients with extensive-stage small cell lung cancer (ES-SCLC) have poor prognoses and unmet medical needs.

Objective: To evaluate the efficacy and safety of toripalimab plus etoposide and platinum-based chemotherapy (EP) vs placebo plus EP as a first-line treatment for patients with ES-SCLC.

Design, Setting, And Participants: This multicenter, double-blind, placebo-controlled phase 3 randomized clinical trial (EXTENTORCH study) enrolled patients from September 26, 2019, to May 20, 2021, and was conducted at 49 sites in China.

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Article Synopsis
  • Phenotypic plasticity allows organisms to adapt their physical traits without changing their genetics, helping them survive in variable environments.
  • This study focused on a type of marine ciliate, Glauconema spp., to understand how they change their traits based on food availability, revealing important genetic information linked to these adaptations.
  • Findings suggest that natural selection helps maintain phenotypic plasticity over time, providing new insights into how unicellular organisms evolve and adapt.
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Major histocompatibility complex (MHC)-bound peptides that originate from tumor-specific genetic alterations, known as neoantigens, are an important class of anticancer therapeutic targets. Accurately predicting peptide presentation by MHC complexes is a key aspect of discovering therapeutically relevant neoantigens. Technological improvements in mass spectrometry-based immunopeptidomics and advanced modeling techniques have vastly improved MHC presentation prediction over the past 2 decades.

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Human leukocyte antigen loss of heterozygosity (HLA LOH) allows cancer cells to escape immune recognition by deleting HLA alleles, causing the suppressed presentation of tumor neoantigens. Despite its importance in immunotherapy response, few methods exist to detect HLA LOH, and their accuracy is not well understood. Here, we develop DASH (Deletion of Allele-Specific HLAs), a machine learning-based algorithm to detect HLA LOH from paired tumor-normal sequencing data.

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Purpose: Extended screen time amongst youth is a pervasive global phenomenon, with wide-ranging implications for health and quality of life. Dry eye disease is increasingly reported as emerging in paediatric populations and is associated with modified blinking behaviour during extended screen time. This study sought to evaluate spontaneous blink rates, dry eye symptomology and screen use habits of young extended screen time users.

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Purpose: While immune checkpoint blockade (ICB) has become a pillar of cancer treatment, biomarkers that consistently predict patient response remain elusive due to the complex mechanisms driving immune response to tumors. We hypothesized that a multi-dimensional approach modeling both tumor and immune-related molecular mechanisms would better predict ICB response than simpler mutation-focused biomarkers, such as tumor mutational burden (TMB).

Experimental Design: Tumors from a cohort of patients with late-stage melanoma ( = 51) were profiled using an immune-enhanced exome and transcriptome platform.

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This article has been withdrawn by the authors. A publication of the manuscript with the correct figures and tables has been approved and the authors state the conclusions of the manuscript remain unaffected. Specifically, errors are in Figure 6A, Supplementary Figure 10B, Supplementary Figure 10C, and Supplementary Table 5.

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The somatic macronucleus (MAC) and germline micronucleus (MIC) of differ in chromosome numbers, sizes, functions, transcriptional activities, and cohesin complex location. However, the higher-order chromatin organization in is still largely unknown. Here, we explored the higher-order chromatin organization in the two distinct nuclei of using the Hi-C and HiChIP methods.

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A goal of speciation genetics is to understand how the genetic components underlying interspecific reproductive barriers originate within species. Unilateral incompatibility (UI) is a postmating prezygotic barrier in which pollen rejection in the female reproductive tract (style) occurs in only one direction of an interspecific cross. Natural variation in the strength of UI has been observed among populations within species in the wild tomato clade.

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Background: New sequencing technologies have lowered financial barriers to whole genome sequencing, but resulting assemblies are often fragmented and far from 'finished'. Updating multi-scaffold drafts to chromosome-level status can be achieved through experimental mapping or re-sequencing efforts. Avoiding the costs associated with such approaches, comparative genomic analysis of gene order conservation (synteny) to predict scaffold neighbours (adjacencies) offers a potentially useful complementary method for improving draft assemblies.

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A 2×2 optofluidic switch chip with an air shutter is proposed. It has a simple structure, small volume, small crosstalk, large extinction ratio, small polarization-dependent loss, and broad operation waveband (400-1700 nm). This 2×2 switch chip has good scalability and can form a number of optical switches by using different microfluidic driving technologies.

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Recent genetic studies and whole-genome sequencing projects have greatly improved our understanding of human variation and clinically actionable genetic information. Smaller ethnic populations, however, remain underrepresented in both individual and large-scale sequencing efforts and hence present an opportunity to discover new variants of biomedical and demographic significance. This report describes the sequencing and analysis of a genome obtained from an individual of Serbian origin, introducing tens of thousands of previously unknown variants to the currently available pool.

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Inversion polymorphisms are responsible for many ecologically important phenotypes and are often found under balancing selection. However, the same features that ensure their large role in local adaptation-especially reduced recombination between alternate arrangements-mean that uncovering the precise loci within inversions that control these phenotypes is unachievable using standard mapping approaches. Here, we take advantage of long-term balancing selection on a pair of inversions in the mosquito Anopheles gambiae to map desiccation tolerance via pool-GWAS.

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Background: Genomes sequenced using short-read, next-generation sequencing technologies can have many errors and may be fragmented into thousands of small contigs. These incomplete and fragmented assemblies lead to errors in gene identification, such that single genes spread across multiple contigs are annotated as separate gene models. Such biases can confound inferences about the number and identity of genes within species, as well as gene gain and loss between species.

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Y chromosomes control essential male functions in many species, including sex determination and fertility. However, because of obstacles posed by repeat-rich heterochromatin, knowledge of Y chromosome sequences is limited to a handful of model organisms, constraining our understanding of Y biology across the tree of life. Here, we leverage long single-molecule sequencing to determine the content and structure of the nonrecombining Y chromosome of the primary African malaria mosquito, Anopheles gambiae We find that the An.

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Current de novo whole-genome sequencing approaches often are inadequate for organisms lacking substantial preexisting genetic data. Problems with these methods are manifest as: large numbers of scaffolds that are not ordered within chromosomes or assigned to individual chromosomes, misassembly of allelic sequences as separate loci when the individual(s) being sequenced are heterozygous, and the collapse of recently duplicated sequences into a single locus, regardless of levels of heterozygosity. Here we propose a new approach for producing de novo whole-genome sequences-which we call recombinant population genome construction-that solves many of the problems encountered in standard genome assembly and that can be applied in model and nonmodel organisms.

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We conducted a comprehensive analysis of a manually curated human signaling network containing 1634 nodes and 5089 signaling regulatory relations by integrating cancer-associated genetically and epigenetically altered genes. We find that cancer mutated genes are enriched in positive signaling regulatory loops, whereas the cancer-associated methylated genes are enriched in negative signaling regulatory loops. We further characterized an overall picture of the cancer-signaling architectural and functional organization.

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