Publications by authors named "Weichen Wu"

Article Synopsis
  • Current metagenomic tools struggle to identify highly divergent RNA viruses, prompting the development of a deep learning algorithm called LucaProt to improve detection in diverse ecosystems.
  • LucaProt combines sequence and structural data to identify a significant number of RNA virus sequences, uncovering 161,979 potential species and 180 supergroups, including some with long and complex genomes.
  • The study not only confirmed some of these novel RNA viruses but also demonstrated their presence across various environments, showcasing the vast diversity of RNA viruses and enhancing our understanding and documentation of the global RNA virome.
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  • * VirID is a new software tool that improves RNA virus discovery and analysis by using a detailed database of RNA-dependent RNA polymerase, enabling better accuracy in profiling and characterizing viruses.
  • * Testing shows that VirID can effectively identify various RNA viruses in real-world samples, providing valuable data on viral diversity and how viruses relate to humans, animals, and plants, making it essential for virology research and monitoring infectious diseases.
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  • The Seoul orthohantavirus (SEOV) is a major cause of hemorrhagic fever with renal syndrome (HFRS) in China, primarily found in small mammal populations across the country, particularly in Yunnan province.
  • A study involving 1,784 small mammals identified 37 SEOV-positive rats, indicating a connection between rodent populations and HFRS outbreaks, while also identifying three SEOV variants, including two novel ones.
  • Phylogenetic analysis suggests SEOV originated in the Yunnan-Kweichow Plateau and has since spread globally through rodents, highlighting the need for further research due to the virus's expanding presence and genetic diversity.
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The deficit in social interaction skills among individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is strongly influenced by personal experiences and social environments. Neuroimaging studies have previously highlighted the link between social impairment and brain activity in ASD. This study aims to develop a method for assessing and identifying ASD using a social cognitive game-based paradigm combined with electroencephalo-graphy (EEG) signaling features.

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Unlabelled: Companion animals such as cats and dogs harbor diverse microbial communities that can potentially impact human health due to close and frequent contact. To better characterize their total infectomes and assess zoonotic risks, we characterized the overall infectomes of companion animals (cats and dogs) and evaluated their potential zoonotic risks. Meta-transcriptomic analyses were performed on 239 samples from cats and dogs collected across China, identifying 24 viral species, 270 bacterial genera, and two fungal genera.

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Yunnan province in China shares its borders with three neighboring countries: Myanmar, Vietnam, and Laos. The region is characterized by a diverse climate and is known to be a suitable habitat for various arthropods, including midges which are notorious for transmitting diseases which pose significant health burdens affecting both human and animal health. A total of 431,100 midges were collected from 15 different locations in the border region of Yunnan province from 2015 to 2020.

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Between 7 December 2022 and 28 February 2023, China experienced a new wave of COVID-19 that swept across the entire country and resulted in an increasing amount of respiratory infections and hospitalizations. The purpose of this study is to reveal the intensity and composition of coinfecting microbial agents. In total, 196 inpatients were recruited from The Third People's Hospital of Shenzhen, and 169 respiratory and 73 blood samples were collected for metagenomic next-generation sequencing.

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Mosquito transmitted viruses are responsible for an increasing burden of human disease. Despite this, little is known about the diversity and ecology of viruses within individual mosquito hosts. Here, using a meta-transcriptomic approach, we determined the viromes of 2,438 individual mosquitoes (81 species), spanning ~4,000 km along latitudes and longitudes in China.

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Objectives: The respiratory tract is the portal of entry for the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). Although a variety of respiratory pathogens other than SARS-CoV-2 have been associated with severe cases of COVID-19 disease, the dynamics of the upper respiratory microbiota during disease the course of disease, and how they impact disease manifestation, remain uncertain.

Methods: We collected 349 longitudinal upper respiratory samples from a cohort of 65 COVID-19 patients (cohort 1), 28 samples from 28 recovered COVID-19 patients (cohort 2), and 59 samples from 59 healthy controls (cohort 3).

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Ticks, an arthropod known for transmitting various pathogens such as viruses, bacteria, and fungi, pose a perpetual public health concern. A total of 2,570 ticks collected from Nujiang Prefecture in Yunnan Province between 2017 and 2022 were included in the study. Through the meta-transcriptomic sequencing of four locally distributed tick species, we identified 13 RNA viruses belonging to eight viral families, namely, , , , , , , , and .

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Traditional optical design methods require designer intervention in the system's evolution from the starting point to the final design. Trial-and-error during design optimization improves system performance step by step but requires much time and effort. A new optical design framework, end-to-end fast automatic design, is proposed and achieved for the freeform reflective optics in this paper, which promotes a new optical design mode.

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Since 2018, the outbreaks of genotype II African swine fever virus (ASFV) in China and several eastern Asian countries have caused a huge impact on the local swine industry, resulting in huge economic losses. However, little is known about the origin, genomic diversity, evolutionary features, and epidemiological history of the genotype II ASFV. Here, 14 high-quality complete genomes of ASFVs were generated via sequencing of samples collected from China over the course of 3 years, followed by phylogenetic and phylodynamic analyses.

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Mosquito transmitted viruses are responsible for an increasing burden of human disease. Despite this, little is known about the diversity and ecology of viruses within individual mosquito hosts. Using a meta-transcriptomic approach, we analysed the virome of 2,438 individual mosquitos (79 species), spanning ~4000 km along latitudes and longitudes in China.

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Article Synopsis
  • Bats are hosts to various zoonotic viruses, but little is known about virus diversity and co-infection rates within individual bats, particularly studied in Yunnan, China.* -
  • An analysis of 149 bats revealed high levels of virus co-infection and spillover, suggesting that these interactions may enhance virus evolution and emergence.* -
  • The study identified five viral species likely pathogenic to humans or livestock, including a novel recombinant SARS-like coronavirus that poses a significant risk due to its ability to bind the human ACE2 receptor.*
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Cats harbor many important viral pathogens, and the knowledge of their diversity has been greatly expanded thanks to increasingly popular molecular sequencing techniques. While the diversity is mostly described in numerous regionally defined studies, there lacks a global overview of the diversity for the majority of cat viruses, and therefore our understanding of the evolution and epidemiology of these viruses was generally inadequate. In this study, we analyzed 12,377 genetic sequences from 25 cat virus species and conducted comprehensive phylodynamic analyses.

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Nelson Bay reovirus (NBV) is an emerging zoonotic virus that can cause acute respiratory disease in humans. These viruses are mainly discovered in Oceania, Africa, and Asia, and bats have been identified as their main animal reservoir. However, despite recent expansion of diversity for NBVs, the transmission dynamics and evolutionary history of NBVs are still unclear.

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Bats are reservoir hosts for many zoonotic viruses. Despite this, relatively little is known about the diversity and abundance of viruses within bats at the level of individual animals, and hence the frequency of virus co-infection and inter-species transmission. Using an unbiased meta-transcriptomics approach we characterised the mammalian associated viruses present in 149 individual bats sampled from Yunnan province, China.

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  • Pangolins are the most illegally traded wild animals in the world, and scientists are studying them because they may carry diseases like SARS-CoV-2.
  • Researchers looked at viruses in 161 pangolins that were smuggled into China and discovered many new types of viruses never seen before in animals.
  • Among the findings, scientists identified a coronavirus related to one found in bats, suggesting that pangolins could spread new harmful viruses to humans.
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Ribonucleotide reductases (RNRs) are essential enzymes in DNA synthesis. However, little is known about the RNRs in plants. Here, we identified a svstl1 mutant from the self-created ethyl methanesulfonate (EMS) mutant library of Setaria viridis.

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Background: The global pork industry is continuously affected by infectious diseases that can result in large-scale mortality, trade restrictions, and major reductions in production. Nevertheless, the cause of many infectious diseases in pigs remains unclear, largely because commonly used diagnostic tools fail to capture the full diversity of potential pathogens and because pathogen co-infection is common.

Results: We used a meta-transcriptomic approach to systematically characterize the pathogens in 136 clinical cases representing different disease syndromes in pigs, as well as in 12 non-diseased controls.

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Background: COVID-19 is an ongoing global pandemic caused by SARS-CoV-2. As of June 2021, 5 emergency vaccines were available for COVID-19 prevention, and with the improvement of vaccination rates and the resumption of activities in each country, verification of vaccination has become an important issue. Currently, in most areas, vaccination and reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) test results are certified and validated on paper.

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The p53 family has the following three members: p53, p63 and p73. p53 is a tumor suppressor gene that frequently exhibits mutation in head and neck cancer. Most p53 mutants are loss-of-function (LoF) mutants, but some acquire some oncogenic function, such as gain of function (GoF).

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Background: The current COVID-19 pandemic is posing a major challenge to public health on a global scale. While it is generally believed that severe COVID-19 results from over-expression of inflammatory mediators (i.e.

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Although metagenomic sequencing has revealed high numbers of viruses in mosquitoes sampled globally, our understanding of how their diversity and abundance varies in time and space as well as by host species and gender remains unclear. To address this, we collected 23,109 mosquitoes over the course of 12 months from a bat-dwelling cave and a nearby village in Yunnan province, China. These samples were organized by mosquito species, mosquito gender, and sampling time for meta-transcriptomic sequencing.

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Article Synopsis
  • The outbreak of "atypical pneumonia" in Wuhan at the end of 2019 was caused by a novel coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2.
  • A study collected respiratory samples from 408 pneumonia patients in Wuhan between 2016-2017, identifying 35 pathogen species, but no SARS-CoV-2 was present.
  • The findings showed a diverse range of common respiratory pathogens and highlighted the higher pathogen abundance in sick patients compared to healthy controls, suggesting a complex infectome in the region.
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