Publications by authors named "Songjing Zhang"

Biochemical signaling and mechano-transduction are both critical in regulating stem cell fate. How crosstalk between mechanical and biochemical cues influences embryonic development, however, is not extensively investigated. Using a comparative study of focal adhesion constituents between mouse embryonic stem cell (mESC) and their differentiated counterparts, we find while zyxin is lowly expressed in mESCs, its levels increase dramatically during early differentiation.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Alstrom syndrome (AS) is one type of monogenic diabetic syndromes caused by mutation in the ALMS1. Due to rare prevalence and overlaps of clinical symptoms, monogenic diabetes is often misdiagnosed. Here, we report a Chinese diabetes patient with poor blood glucose control and insulin resistance.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Breast cancer (BC) cell lines are useful experimental models to understand cancer biology. Yet, their relevance to modelling cancer remains unclear. To better understand the tumour-modelling efficacy of cell lines, we performed RNA-seq analyses on a combined dataset of 2D and 3D cultures of tumourigenic MCF7 and non-tumourigenic MCF10A.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Huangjiu is a popular Chinese traditional alcoholic beverage, while its brewing processes have rarely been explored. We herein report the first gapless, near-finished genome assembly of the industrial strain Aspergillus flavus SU-16 for huangjiu brewing. This work provides insights and supports for the further industrial applications of A.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF
Article Synopsis
  • Focal adhesions (FAs) help cells detect the stiffness of their environment and influence cell movement through changes in the actin cytoskeleton and FA maturation.
  • Zyxin is a key protein within FAs that connects the actin structures to FAs, and its absence in NIH3T3 fibroblasts disrupts their ability to respond to changes in extracellular matrix rigidity.
  • Unlike normal fibroblasts that migrate toward stiffer areas (durotaxis), zyxin knockdown fibroblasts showed no directional migration based on substrate rigidity, highlighting zyxin's crucial role in rigidity sensing and guiding cell movement.
View Article and Find Full Text PDF

High content of biogenic amine (BA) in huangjiu could pose serious quality concerns. More than 71% of BA in huangjiu were carried over from seriflux (rice soaking wastewater), which were produced by some BA producing bacteria during rice soaking process. A BA non-producing strain, Lactobacillus plantarum JN01, was introduced to rice soaking process, which decreased BA content in seriflux by 93.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Protein phosphorylation and dephosphorylation govern intracellular signal transduction and cellular functions. Kinases and phosphatases are involved in the regulation and development of many diseases such as Alzheimer's, diabetes, and cancer. While the functions and roles of many kinases, as well as their substrates, are well understood, phosphatases are comparatively less well studied.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

The Hippo pathway regulates cell proliferation, survival, apoptosis and differentiation. During carcinogenesis, members of the Hippo pathway are mutated to avoid anoikis and promote anchorage independent growth. Although many regulators of the Hippo pathway have been reported, negative regulators of the hippo kinases are not well studied.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Endothelial cells adopt unique cell fates during sprouting angiogenesis, differentiating into tip or stalk cells. The fate selection process is directed by Delta-Notch lateral inhibition pathway. Classical Delta-Notch models produce a spatial pattern of tip cells separated by a single stalk cell, or the salt-and-pepper pattern.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Cancer metastasis is a complex mechanism involving multiple processes. Previously, our integrative proteome, transcriptome, and phosphoproteome study reported that the levels of serine/threonine phosphatase POPX2 were positively correlated with cancer cell motility through modulating MAPK signaling. Surprisingly, here we found that POPX2 knockdown cells induced more numerous and larger tumor nodules in lungs in longer term animal studies.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Metastatic tumour recurrence due to failed treatments remains a major challenge of breast cancer clinical management. Here we report that interleukin-1 receptor-associated kinase 1 (IRAK1) is overexpressed in a subset of breast cancers, in particular triple-negative breast cancer (TNBC), where it acts to drive aggressive growth, metastasis and acquired resistance to paclitaxel treatment. We show that IRAK1 overexpression confers TNBC growth advantage through NF-κB-related cytokine secretion and metastatic TNBC cells exhibit gain of IRAK1 dependency, resulting in high susceptibility to genetic and pharmacologic inhibition of IRAK1.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Background: Cardiovascular disease is prevalent in type 2 diabetics, and microalbuminuria is associated with cardiovascular disease morbidity. We aimed to investigate the potential association between low-grade albuminuria and arterial stiffness in patients with type 2 diabetes.

Methods: Between 2009 and 2013, a retrospective study was performed in 578 patients with type 2 diabetes (339 male patients and 239 female patients) with normal urinary albumin-to-creatinine ratios (ACRs; <30 mg/g) from Fuzhou, China.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

POPX2 is a serine/threonine phosphatase belonging to the protein phosphatase 2C (PP2C) family that has been found to be elevated in invasive breast cancer cells. Silencing of POPX2 results in lower cell motility and invasiveness. The molecular mechanism of POPX2-regulated cell motility is not well understood.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

A cross-sectional analysis was performed to explore the relationship between regional body fat distribution and blood pressure in non-obese subjects with different status of blood pressure. Dual-energy X-ray absorptiometry was performed to measure fat mass. Obesity was defined as present body fat ≥25% in males and ≥35% in females.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Objective: To compare the application of two different definitions of MS (IDF2005 and ATPIII2001) in this study population. According to IDF2005, evaluate the impact of body fat content and its distribution for the risk of metabolic syndrome.

Methods: The sample of 818 subjects measure the simple anthropometric parameters including body mass index (BMI), waist circumference, waist-hip ratio (WHR), and so on.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF