Publications by authors named "Weifeng Hu"

Myxobacteria are well known for multicellular social behaviors and valued for biosynthesis of natural products. Myxobacteria social behaviors such as clumping growth severely hamper strain cultivation and genetic manipulation. Using DK1622, we engineered Hu04, which is deficient in multicellular behavior and pigmentation.

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Article Synopsis
  • Gene duplication is common in evolution, but the reasons some genes are lost or retained remain unclear; the study focuses on the trigger factor (TF), a ribosome-associated chaperone typically found as a single copy in most bacteria.
  • The research shows that bacteria with multiple TF homologs usually have one complete TF copy, while others are missing the important N-terminal domain, which binds to ribosomes and is crucial for its function.
  • Overproducing TF leads to negative effects on cell function and protein production, suggesting that the gene's dosage must be carefully regulated; this finding helps explain why bacteria maintain mainly a single copy of TF despite gene duplication events.
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Background: The incidence of osteoarthritis (OA) is increasing, yet its pathogenesis remains largely unknown. Recent studies suggest that abnormal subchondral bone remodeling plays a crucial role in OA development, highlighting a gap in clinical treatments targeting this aspect. Soybean Isoflavone (SI) has shown potential in treating OA, although its mechanisms are not fully understood.

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Renal cell carcinoma (RCC) is a common malignancy of the urinary system. Although traditional therapies, such as surgery assisted with chemotherapy have improved the quality of life and survival time of patients with RCC, patients with metastasis or recurrence benefit little from such therapies. At present, little is known about the underlying mechanisms of RCC, rendering treatment selection and implementation challenging.

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Rhubarb is widely used in health care, but causing a great amount of rhein-containing herbal residue. Rhein with several toxicities might pollute environment, damage ecology and even hazard human health if left untreated. In this study, the degradation effects of bisulfite- (BS) and peroxymonosulfate- (PMS) based oxidation systems on rhein in rhubarb residue were compared and investigated.

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Unlabelled: The clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats and their associated proteins (CRISPR-Cas) system widely occurs in prokaryotic organisms to recognize and destruct genetic invaders. Systematic collation and characterization of endogenous CRISPR-Cas systems are conducive to our understanding and potential utilization of this natural genetic machinery. In this study, we screened 39 complete and 692 incomplete genomes of myxobacteria using a combined strategy to dispose of the abridged genome information and revealed at least 19 CRISPR-Cas subtypes, which were distributed with a taxonomic difference and often lost stochastically in intraspecies strains.

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Article Synopsis
  • Tislelizumab, an anti-PD-1 antibody approved in China and Europe, generally shows a good safety profile with no severe liver or kidney issues reported.
  • A case study of a 74-year-old man revealed he experienced significant acute kidney (grade 3) and liver (grade 4) injuries after receiving tislelizumab for esophageal cancer, confirming previously known risks of immune checkpoint inhibitors (ICIs).
  • The case underscores the necessity for careful monitoring and management of ICI-related toxicities and emphasizes the need for more research to understand risk factors and develop effective treatments.
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Constructed wetlands (CWs) are frequently used for effective biological treatment of nitrogen-rich wastewater with external carbon source addition; however, these approaches often neglect the interaction between plant litter and biochar in biochar-amended CW environments. To address this, we conducted a comprehensive study to assess the impacts of single or combined addition of common reed litter and reed biochar (pyrolyzed at 300 and 500 °C) on nitrogen removal, greenhouse gas emission, dissolved organic matter (DOM) dynamics, and microbial activity. The results showed that combined addition of reed litter and biochar to CWs significantly improved nitrate and total nitrogen removal compared with biochar addition alone.

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Thanks to its powerful ability to depict high-resolution anatomical information, magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) has become an essential non-invasive scanning technique in clinical practice. However, excessive acquisition time often leads to the degradation of image quality and psychological discomfort among subjects, hindering its further popularization. Besides reconstructing images from the undersampled protocol itself, multi-contrast MRI protocols bring promising solutions by leveraging additional morphological priors for the target modality.

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Microorganisms are important sources of lipolytic enzymes with characteristics for wide promising usages in the specific industrial biotechnology. The cellulolytic myxobacterium is rich of lipolytic enzymes in the genome, but little has been investigated. Here, we discerned 406 potential lipolytic enzymes in 13 sequenced genomes.

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Kidney renal clear cell carcinoma (KIRC) is the most prevalent type of kidney cancer and causes thousands of deaths each year. The prognosis for KIRC is poor. One critical factor is that the mechanism beneath KIRC is unclear.

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The accurate segmentation of carotid plaques in ultrasound videos will provide evidence for clinicians to evaluate the properties of plaques and treat patients effectively. However, the confusing background, blurry boundaries and plaque movement in ultrasound videos make accurate plaque segmentation challenging. To address the above challenges, we propose the Refined Feature-based Multi-frame and Multi-scale Fusing Gate Network (RMFG_Net), which captures spatial and temporal features in consecutive video frames for high-quality segmentation results and no manual annotation of the first frame.

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Introduction: To analyze the differences in system functions, interaction behaviors and user experience between iOS and Android smart phone operating system, and then study the differences in their brand images, so as to provide theory and research method for shaping corporate brand images from the perspective of product interaction design.

Methods: This study was divided into three stages. In the first stage, the functional information architecture of iOS and Android smart phone operating system are studied comparatively by using information visualization methods.

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To observe the antioxidative effects of N-(9,10-anthraquinone-2-ylcarbonyl) xanthine oxidase inhibitors (NAY) and models of hyperuricemia and explore the mechanism. A classical experimental method of acute toxicity and a chronic toxicity test were used to compare the toxic effects of different doses of NAY in mice. The hyperuricemia mouse model was established by gavage of potassium oxonate .

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Since the last century, user experience has been regarded as a key concept in the process of product and service design. With the development of positive psychology, the transformation from negative to positive user experience has also taken place in the field of user experience; it emphasizes exploring the future possibility of positive user experience rather than just solving existing problems. Based on the research and analysis of existing literature, this study makes it clear that positive user experience research should be based on the "positive experience," and arousing a positive emotion is conducive to improving positive user experience.

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After the severe initial insults of acute kidney injury, progressive kidney tubulointerstitial fibrosis may occur, the peritubular capillary (PTC) rarefaction plays a key role in the disease progression. However, the mechanisms of PTC damage were not fully understood and potential therapeutic interventions were not explored. Previous studies of our research team and others in this field suggested that bone marrow-derived mesenchymal stem cells (BMSCs) transplanted into the AKI rat model may preserve the kidney function and pathological changes.

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Article Synopsis
  • Scientists studied genes that help make special substances called epothilones, which help fight cancer.
  • They found that these genes are organized in a large group and can have smaller parts inside them called internal promoters that help control their activity.
  • By activating these internal promoters using a special tool, they discovered that it helps the genes work better, which could improve the amount of epothilones produced, especially in certain strains that normally make low amounts.
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Genome mining has revealed that myxobacteria contain a myriad of cryptic biosynthetic gene clusters (BGCs). Here, we report the characterization of a panel of myxobacterial promoters with variable strength that are applicable in the engineering of BGCs in myxobacteria. The screened strongest constitutive promoter was used to efficiently enhance the expression of two complex BGCs governing the biosynthesis of myxochromide and DKxanthene in the model myxobacterium DK1622.

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In the industrial design industry, innovation and entrepreneurship made by professional and technical talents will become an important trend in the future development of the economy and society. The great changes in the design industry, such as the diversification and complication of design objects, the relatively restricted knowledge structure of design talents, the lack of entrepreneurial experience, and other reasons, have led to the low success rate of industrial design talent entrepreneurship. The purpose of this research is to analyze and explore the effects of integrated innovation design teaching modes and methods of cultivating the innovative and entrepreneurial abilities of industrial design professionals to help industrial design professionals to improve their success rate of establishing new companies.

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Background: Functional constipation is a disease with a high incidence, which has a bad effect on general health, mental health, and social functioning. However, current treatment is sometimes unsatisfactory. Acupuncture has been proven effective in some randomized controlled trials.

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Estuaries connect rivers with the ocean and are considered transition regions due to the continuous inputs from rivers. Microbiota from different sources converge and undergo succession in these transition regions, but their assembly mechanisms along environmental gradients remain unclear. Here, we found that salinity had a stronger effect on planktonic than on benthic microbial communities, and the dominant planktonic bacteria changed more distinctly than the dominant benthic bacteria with changes in salinity.

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Rationale: Multiorgan/system injury was observed in severely infected coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) patients, in addition to viral pneumonia. Recognizing and correcting the key and immediate dysfunctions may reduce mortality.

Patient Concerns: A 66-year-old previously healthy male patient was referred to the isolation ward in Guanggu Branch of Hubei Province Maternity and Childcare Hospital with a high fever and nonproductive cough for twenty days.

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As coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic poses a substantial global public health threat, traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) was used in 91.50% of the COVID-19 cases in China, showing encouraging results in improving symptom management and reducing the deterioration, mortality, and recurrence rates. A total of 166 modified herbal formulae consisting of 179 single herbal medicines were collected for treating COVID-19 in China.

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BACKGROUND The insulin-like growth factor 1 (IGF1) pathway is deeply involved in cell proliferation, including tumorigenesis. Aberrant genetic alterations of IGF1 pathway members were revealed in certain malignancies, including chondrosarcoma (CHS). We proposed that genetic polymorphisms in IGF1 pathways might be associated with susceptibility to tumorigenesis and prognosis of CHS in Chinese populations.

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