Publications by authors named "Z-M Li"

Background: Approximately half of the patients with acute ischemic stroke who receive intravenous thrombolysis (IVT) do not achieve an excellent outcome. Remote ischemic conditioning (RIC) as a promising neuroprotective treatment may improve clinical outcomes in this population. This study aimed to assess the efficacy and safety of RIC in patients with IVT.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Setting up a global SARS-CoV-2 surveillance system requires an understanding of how virus isolation and propagation practices, use of animal or human sera, and different neutralisation assay platforms influence assessment of SARS-CoV-2 antigenicity. In this study, with the contribution of 15 independent laboratories across all WHO regions, we carried out a controlled analysis of neutralisation assay platforms using the first WHO International Standard for antibodies to SARS-CoV-2 variants of concern (source: NIBSC). Live virus isolates (source: WHO BioHub or individual labs) or spike plasmids (individual labs) for pseudovirus production were used to perform neutralisation assays using the same serum panels.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Japanese encephalitis virus (JEV) is regarded as an emerging and reemerging pathogen that is a primary cause of viral encephalitis in humans. However, there is a scarcity of research on the prevalence of JEV genotypes across the different mosquito species in Shanghai. In this study, the diversity of mosquito species and prevalence of JEV in pig and sheep farms in Shanghai were surveyed in 2022.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Rationale And Objectives: Effective trauma care in emergency departments necessitates rapid diagnosis by interdisciplinary teams using various medical data. This study constructed a multimodal diagnostic model for abdominal trauma using deep learning on non-contrast computed tomography (CT) and unstructured text data, enhancing the speed and accuracy of solid organ assessments.

Materials And Methods: Data were collected from patients undergoing abdominal CT scans.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Japanese encephalitis virus (JEV) NS2B-NS3 is a protein complex composed of NS3 proteases and an NS2B co-factor. The N-terminal protease domain (180 residues) of NS3 (NS3(pro)) interacts directly with a central 40-amino acid hydrophilic domain of NS2B (NS2B(H)) to form an active serine protease. In this study, the recombinant NS2B(H)-NS3(pro) proteases were prepared in and used to compare the enzymatic activity between genotype I (GI) and III (GIII) NS2B-NS3 proteases.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Genomic profiling often fails to predict therapeutic outcomes in cancer. This failure is, in part, due to a myriad of genetic alterations and the plasticity of cancer signaling networks. Functional profiling, which ascertains signaling dynamics, is an alternative method to anticipate drug responses.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Background: Play is an indispensable and meaningful activity in children's daily life. Research has shown that autistic children often exhibit differences in play development. The core traits of autism, such as distinct patterns in social interaction and communication, focused interests, and repetitive behaviors, frequently manifest in their play.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Designing proteins with improved functions requires a deep understanding of how sequence and function are related, a vast space that is hard to explore. The ability to efficiently compress this space by identifying functionally important features is extremely valuable. Here we establish a method called EvoScan to comprehensively segment and scan the high-fitness sequence space to obtain anchor points that capture its essential features, especially in high dimensions.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

To achieve high selectivity in photocatalytic CO reduction to C products, increasing the number of CO adsorption sites and lowering the energy barriers for key intermediates are critical. A ZnInS (ZIS)/MoO (Z-M) photocatalyst is presented, in which plasmonic MoO generates hot electrons, creating a multielectron environment in ZIS that facilitates efficient C─C coupling reactions. Density functional theory (DFT) calculations reveal that MoO reduces the formation energy of sulfur vacancies (S) in ZIS, thereby enhancing CO adsorption and activation.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Acinar cell carcinoma (ACC) and pancreatoblastoma (PBL) are rare pancreatic malignancies with acinar differentiation. Proteogenomic profiling of ACC and PBL revealed distinct protein expression patterns compared to pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC) and benign pancreas. ACC and PBL exhibited similarities, with enrichment in proteins related to RNA processing, chromosome organization, and the mitoribosome, while PDACs overexpressed proteins associated with actin-based processes, extracellular matrix, and immune-active stroma.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Glucagon-like peptide-1 (GLP-1) analogs are important therapeutics for type 2 diabetes and obesity. Ecnoglutide (XW003) is a novel, long-acting GLP-1 analog. We conducted a Phase 2, randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled study enrolling 145 adults with T2DM.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF
Article Synopsis
  • Cancer is the leading cause of death in adult dogs, with a significant chance (one-third) of developing it during their lifetime.
  • A study using shallow whole-genome sequencing analyzed blood cell-free DNA from four dogs with tumors (one benign and three malignant) and 38 healthy dogs.
  • Results showed that healthy dogs and the benign tumor dog had no copy number aberrations, while the malignant tumor dogs exhibited noticeable copy number variations and shorter DNA fragment sizes, indicating the potential for non-invasive cancer detection in dogs.
View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Hip arthroscopy has become a predominant treatment for hip disorders such as femoroacetabular impingement syndrome and labral injury, and appropriate distraction for the hip joint is necessary for successful surgery. The traditional distraction method uses a perineal post but may cause complications such as perineum injury and nerve damage. For this reason, some surgeons have proposed postless distraction techniques, but they usually require additional equipment purchase and cost, which is not conducive to application.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Rationale And Objectives: This study explored the intratumor heterogeneity (ITH) of esophageal squamous cell carcinoma (ESCC) using computed tomography (CT) and investigated the value of CT-based ITH in predicting the response to immune checkpoint inhibitor (ICI) plus chemotherapy in patients with ESCC.

Materials And Methods: This retrospective study included 416 patients with ESCC who received ICI plus chemotherapy at two independent hospitals between January 2019 and July 2022. Multiparametric CT features were extracted from ESCC lesions and screened using hierarchical clustering and dimensionality reduction algorithms.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Engineering the genetic code of an organism provides the basis for (i) making any organism safely resistant to natural viruses and (ii) preventing genetic information flow into and out of genetically modified organisms while (iii) allowing the biosynthesis of genetically encoded unnatural polymers. Achieving these three goals requires the reassignment of multiple of the 64 codons nature uses to encode proteins. However, synonymous codon replacement-recoding-is frequently lethal, and how recoding impacts fitness remains poorly explored.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF
Article Synopsis
  • The study evaluates the effectiveness of neoadjuvant immunotherapy combined with chemotherapy in patients with localized EGFR-mutant non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) through a phase 2 trial involving 18 participants.
  • Interim results show that while many patients had positive radiological responses, only 44% reached major pathological response, and there were no cases of complete response.
  • The research indicates that certain T cell populations are linked to resistance against immunotherapy and suggests that monitoring circulating tumor DNA (ctDNA) could help identify patients less likely to respond to such treatments.
View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Background: Hyperproliferation of pulmonary arterial smooth muscle cells (PASMCs) and consequent pulmonary vascular remodeling are the crucial pathological features of pulmonary hypertension (PH). Protein methylation has been shown to be critically involved in PASMC proliferation and PH, but the underlying mechanism remains largely unknown.

Methods: PH animal models were generated by treating mice/rats with chronic hypoxia for 4 weeks.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Therapeutic resistance represents a bottleneck to treatment in advanced gastric cancer (GC). Ferroptosis is an iron-dependent form of non-apoptotic cell death and is associated with anti-cancer therapeutic efficacy. Further investigations are required to clarify the underlying mechanisms.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) is one of the most important pathogens causing respiratory tract infection in humans, especially in infants and the elderly. The identification and structural resolution of the potent neutralizing epitopes on RSV fusion (F) protein enable an "epitope-focused" vaccine design. However, the display of RSV F epitope II on the surface of the widely-used human hepatitis B virus core antigen (HBcAg) has failed to induce neutralizing antibody response in mice.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Designing proteins with improved functions requires a deep understanding of how sequence and function are related, a vast space that is hard to explore. The ability to efficiently compress this space by identifying functionally important features is extremely valuable. Here, we first establish a method called EvoScan to comprehensively segment and scan the high-fitness sequence space to obtain anchor points that capture its essential features, especially in high dimensions.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

A 39-year-old man who did not smoke was admitted to the hospital with recurrent cough for 1 year, accompanied by sputum expectoration (with a small amount of white phlegm), acid regurgitation, and belching. Nasal symptoms or other cough-related contributing factors were denied. The patient reported that his cough mainly occurred at nighttime and was aggravated in the supine position.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

The function of the mammalian brain relies upon the specification and spatial positioning of diversely specialized cell types. Yet, the molecular identities of the cell types and their positions within individual anatomical structures remain incompletely known. To construct a comprehensive atlas of cell types in each brain structure, we paired high-throughput single-nucleus RNA sequencing with Slide-seq-a recently developed spatial transcriptomics method with near-cellular resolution-across the entire mouse brain.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Background: Primary ciliary dyskinesia (PCD) is a rare disorder of motile cilia associated with situs abnormalities. At least 12% of patients with PCD have situs ambiguus (SA), including organ laterality defects falling outside normal arrangement (situs solitus [SS]) or mirror image inversion (situs inversus totalis [SIT]).

Research Question: Do patients with PCD and SA achieve worse clinical outcomes compared with those with SS or SIT?

Study Design And Methods: This cross-sectional, multicenter study evaluated participants aged 21 years or younger with PCD.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Background: Individuals with type 2 diabetes (T2D) have an increased risk of coronary artery disease (CAD), but questions remain about the underlying pathology. Identifying which CAD loci are modified by T2D in the development of subclinical atherosclerosis (coronary artery calcification [CAC], carotid intima-media thickness, or carotid plaque) may improve our understanding of the mechanisms leading to the increased CAD in T2D.

Methods: We compared the common and rare variant associations of known CAD loci from the literature on CAC, carotid intima-media thickness, and carotid plaque in up to 29 670 participants, including up to 24 157 normoglycemic controls and 5513 T2D cases leveraging whole-genome sequencing data from the Trans-Omics for Precision Medicine program.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF