Publications by authors named "Yunyang Zhao"

The emergence of graphene quantum dots (GQDs) expands the use of graphene derivatives in nanomedicine for its direct therapeutic applications in treating neurodegeneration, inflammation, metabolic dysfunction, and among others. Nevertheless, the biosafety assessment of GQDs remains deficient mostly because of the diverse surface characteristics of the nanoparticles. Our prior work demonstrated that GQDs can induce strong thigmotactic effects in zebrafish larvae over a wide range of concentrations, yet the underlying metabolic mechanisms remain largely unknown.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

In this study, we built classification models using machine learning techniques to predict the bioactivity of non-covalent inhibitors of Bruton's tyrosine kinase (BTK) and to provide interpretable and transparent explanations for these predictions. To achieve this, we gathered data on BTK inhibitors from the Reaxys and ChEMBL databases, removing compounds with covalent bonds and duplicates to obtain a dataset of 3895 inhibitors of non-covalent. These inhibitors were characterized using MACCS fingerprints and Morgan fingerprints, and four traditional machine learning algorithms (decision trees (DT), random forests (RF), support vector machines (SVM), and extreme gradient boosting (XGBoost)) were used to build 16 classification models.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Introduction: Ixekizumab, a highly selective interleukin-17A monoclonal antibody, was approved for the treatment of moderate-to-severe psoriasis (PsO) in 2016. Limited real-world data are available on its effectiveness from a patient's perspective shortly (2 to 4 weeks) after initiation and upon continuation for 24 weeks.

Objective: To describe patient-reported clinical and quality-of-life outcomes after initiating ixekizumab using data collected from the United States Taltz® Customer Support Program.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF
Article Synopsis
  • FMS-like tyrosine kinase 3 (FLT3) is a crucial target for cancer therapy, and this study analyzed 3867 FLT3 inhibitors using various data representation techniques like MACCS, ECFP4, and TT fingerprints.
  • A total of 36 classification models were developed, with the best-performing model achieving an accuracy of 85.83% using deep neural networks and TT fingerprints.
  • The study also identified key structural features and fragments of FLT3 inhibitors through clustering and analyzed their activity, highlighting specific chemical groups as significant for inhibition effectiveness.
View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Graphene quantum dots (GQDs) recently gain much attention for its medicinal values in treating diseases such as neurodegeneration and inflammations. However, owing to the high permeability of GQDs across the blood-brain barrier, whether its retention in the central nervous system (CNS) perturbs neurobehaviors remains less reported. In the study, the locomotion of zebrafish larvae (Danio rerio) was fully evaluated when administrated by two GQDs in a concentration gradient, respectively as reduced-GQDs (R-GQDs): 150, 300, 600, 1200, and 2400 g/L, and graphene oxide QDs (GOQDs): 60, 120, 240, 480, and 960 g/L.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

GQDs show great potential in drug carriers, bioimaging, biosensors, theranostics, and are recently reported as promising therapeutic agents to treat amyloid-related diseases such as Parkinson's disease and inflammations such as colitis. However, current toxicity data about GQDs based on in vivo toxicity assessments remain scarce. In the study, we examined the mRNA expression changes of zebrafish embryos exposed to four types of GQDs, including raw graphene quantum dots (R-GQDs), graphene oxide quantum dots (GOQDs), carboxyl GQDs (C-GQDs), and aminated GQDs (A-GQDs).

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Exogenous pollution of Chinese medicinal materials by pesticide residues and heavy metal ions has attracted great attention. Relying on the rapid development of nanotechnology and multidisciplinary fields, fluorescent techniques have been widely applied in contaminant detection and pollution monitoring due to their advantages of simple preparation, low cost, high throughput and others. Most importantly, synchronous detection of multi-targets has always been pursued as one of the major goals in the design of fluorescent probes.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Pesticide residue contamination has become an urgent issue since it threatens both the natural environment and public health. In this study, a fluorescent method for detecting dithiocarbamate (DTC) compounds was constructed based on novel nickel nanoclusters (Ni NCs) and copper ions (Cu). The water-soluble fluorescent Ni NCs were synthesized for the first time through a one-pot method using glutathione as stabilizer and ascorbic acid as reducing agent.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Aggregation-induced luminescence quenching of carbon nanodots (CDs) is the main obstacle for their applications in solid-state light emitting devices. Herein, we developed a one-step synthesis of solid-state emissive CDs with surface aluminum-based polymerization by adding AlCl in citric acid and urea via a microwave-heating dehydration process. Due to the strong coordination ability of Al ions with N and O atoms, considerable steric hindrance of Al-based cross-linked polymerization was introduced on the surface of the CDs, which not only avoided aggregation of the green emissive carbon cores but also facilitated efficient energy transfer from the blue emissive polymerized surface to the green emissive carbon cores in aggregates, leading to enhanced green emissions with a photoluminescence quantum yield (PLQY) of 72.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Background: Raccoon eyes or periorbital ecchymosis is caused by blood tracking into periorbital tissues, which is mostly recognized in injuries of head and neck, basal skull fractures, convexity fractures and facial fractures. It was also reported in systematic disorders, such as multiple myeloma, amyloidosis, Kaposi's sarcoma, migraine and neuroblastoma. However, it is unusual to see a patient showing periorbital purpura after kidney biopsy with no other ecchymosis.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Anthocyanins are natural health promoting pigments that can be produced in large quantities in some purple carrot cultivars. Decoration patterns of anthocyanins, such as acylation, can greatly influence their stability and biological properties and use in the food industry as nutraceuticals and natural colorants. Despite recent advances made toward understanding the genetic control of anthocyanin accumulation in purple carrot, the genetic mechanism controlling acylation of anthocyanin in carrot root have not been studied yet.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Purple carrots can accumulate large quantities of anthocyanins in their roots and -in some genetic backgrounds- petioles, and therefore they represent an excellent dietary source of antioxidant phytonutrients. In a previous study, using linkage analysis in a carrot F mapping population segregating for root and petiole anthocyanin pigmentation, we identified a region in chromosome 3 with co-localized QTL for all anthocyanin pigments of the carrot root, whereas petiole pigmentation segregated as a single dominant gene and mapped to one of these "root pigmentation" regions conditioning anthocyanin biosynthesis. In the present study, we performed fine mapping combined with gene expression analyses (RNA-Seq and RT-qPCR) to identify candidate genes controlling anthocyanin pigmentation in the carrot root and petiole.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Porcine deltacoronavirus (PDCoV) has recently emerged as an enteric pathogen that can cause serious vomiting and diarrhea in suckling piglets. The first outbreak of PDCoV occurred in the United States in 2014 and was followed by reports of PDCoV in South Korea, China, Thailand, Lao People's Democratic Republic, and Vietnam, leading to economic losses for pig farms and posing a considerable threat to the swine industry worldwide. Our previous studies have shown that PDCoV encodes three accessory proteins, NS6, NS7, and NS7a, but the functions of these proteins in viral replication, pathogenesis, and immune regulation remain unclear.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Background: Sweet cherry is consumed widely across the world and provides substantial economic benefits in regions where it is grown. While cherry breeding has been conducted in the Pacific Northwest for over half a century, little is known about the genetic architecture of important traits. We used a genome-enabled mixed model to predict the genetic performance of 505 individuals for 32 phenological, disease response and fruit quality traits evaluated in the RosBREED sweet cherry crop data set.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF
Article Synopsis
  • Fischoederius elongates is a trematode affecting ruminants, often unnoticed due to a lack of symptoms, but it can lead to significant economic losses in animal breeding.
  • The mitochondrial genome of F. elongates is 14,120 bp long, containing several key genes and showing a similar gene arrangement to other trematodes, which can aid in research.
  • Analyzing its complete mitochondrial genome will enhance phylogenetic and epidemiological studies related to F. elongates and its family, Paramphistomidae.*
View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Background: Inter-specific hybridization occurs frequently in plants, which may induce genetic and epigenetic instabilities in the resultant hybrids, allopolyploids and introgressants. It remains unclear however whether pollination by alien pollens of an incompatible species may impose a "biological stress" even in the absence of genome-merger or genetic introgression, whereby genetic and/or epigenetic instability of the maternal recipient genome might be provoked.

Results: We report here the identification of a rice mutator-phenotype from a set of rice plants derived from a crossing experiment involving two remote and apparently incompatible species, Oryza sativa L.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF