Publications by authors named "Zhenyu Lei"

Article Synopsis
  • The study focuses on the role of a specific circular RNA, WRNIP1 (circWRNIP1), in the development of ovarian follicles in chickens, proposing its importance in egg production.
  • Emerging research highlights how circWRNIP1 promotes the growth of granulosa cells while reducing cell death, indicating its crucial role in selecting and maturing ovarian follicles.
  • The research also uncovers the molecular mechanisms through which circWRNIP1 influences signaling pathways (PI3K-AKT and ERK1/2) via interactions with miR-129-5p and IGF2, which could lead to advancements in breeding strategies.
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Circular RNAs have emerged as critical regulators of gene expression across various biological systems. In this study, circAGO3, originating from exons 5, 6, 7, and 8 of the AGO3 gene in chickens, is characterized for its stability and differential expression during both embryonic and post-hatch stages. Overexpression of circAGO3 in chicken skeletal muscle markedly disrupts myogenesis by downregulating muscle differentiation markers and upregulating genes associated with muscle atrophy.

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The use of supported metal-based heterogeneous catalysts is very ubiquitous in the modern chemical industry. Although high reactivity has been achieved, conventional supported metal-based heterogeneous catalysts commonly face the problem of rapid deactivation, generally involving leaching, poisoning or sintering of the active metal species, which is particularly serious in various solid acid catalysis processes. To overcome these drawbacks, different strategies have been adopted, including strengthening metal-support interactions, confining metal species in various porous materials, or coating the active metal nanoparticles with thin shells, which may generate effective metal-based nanocomposite catalysts with enhanced stability.

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Article Synopsis
  • Structural biology research on terpene synthases (TSs) helps understand how they create diverse terpene products, but there are few solved structures compared to over 95,000 known terpenoids.
  • The text outlines key aspects of TSs, including their catalytic logic, structural designs, and metal-binding features.
  • It also details methods for studying TSs and explores future possibilities for engineering new terpene molecules that are hard to make through traditional chemical methods.
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Ultrasound detection is a potent tool for the clinical diagnosis of various diseases due to its real-time, convenient, and noninvasive qualities. Yet, existing ultrasound beamforming and related methods face a big challenge to improve both the quality and speed of imaging for the required clinical applications. The most notable characteristic of ultrasound signal data is its spatial and temporal features.

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Little is known about the structures and catalytic mechanisms of sesterterpene synthases (StTSs), which greatly hinders the structure-based engineering of StTSs for structural diversity expansion of sesterterpenes. We here report on the crystal structures of the terpene cyclization (TC) domains of two fungal StTSs: sesterfisherol synthase (NfSS) and sesterbrasiliatriene synthase (PbSS). Both TC structures contain benzyltriethylammonium chloride (BTAC), pyrophosphate (PPi), and magnesium ions (Mg), clearly defining the catalytic active sites.

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Slime mold algorithm (SMA) is a nature-inspired algorithm that simulates the biological optimization mechanisms and has achieved great results in various complex stochastic optimization problems. Owing to the simulated biological search principle of slime mold, SMA has a unique advantage in global optimization problem. However, it still suffers from issues of missing the optimal solution or collapsing to local optimum when facing complicated problems.

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Ultrasound imaging is widely used in medical diagnosis. It has the advantages of being performed in real time, cost-efficient, noninvasive, and nonionizing. The traditional delay-and-sum (DAS) beamformer has low resolution and contrast.

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Protein structure prediction (PSP) is predicting the three-dimensional of protein from its amino acid sequence only based on the information hidden in the protein sequence. One of the efficient tools to describe this information is protein energy functions. Despite the advancements in biology and computer science, PSP is still a challenging problem due to its large protein conformation space and inaccurate energy functions.

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Fabrication of high-performance superconducting wires and tapes is essential for large-scale applications of superconducting materials. The powder-in-tube (PIT) method involves a series of cold processes and heat treatments and has been widely used for fabricating BSCCO, MgB, and iron-based superconducting wires. The densification of the superconducting core is limited by traditional heat treatment under atmospheric pressure.

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Background: Microwaves (MWs) deliver relatively high temperatures into biological tissue and cover a large ablation zone. This study aims to evaluate the efficacy and effectiveness of water-cooled double-needle MW ablation arrays in assisting the hepatic transection of an pig model.

Methods: Our research program comprised computer modeling, tissue-mimicking phantom experiments, and pig liver experiments.

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Coccidiosis is an intestinal parasitic disease that causes huge economic losses in the poultry industry globally. Henan and Hubei, as important poultry production provinces in China, have great pressure for the prevention and control of chicken coccidiosis. In order to obtain information on the local prevalence of Eimeria species, we used an internal transcribed spacer 1 (ITS1) sequence of ribosomal DNA to identify the species from 318 fresh fecal samples.

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The fast Li-ion pathways in crystals contribute to superionic conductivity-extraordinarily high ionic conductivity-of the LiGePS (LGPS) structure. Composition tuning is expected to improve the conductivity. The phase behavior, microstructure, and ion dynamics of a series of solid solutions of LiGeS-LiPS (4/1 ≥ / ≥ 1/2) were studied by multiple Li and P solid-state NMR methods.

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Introduction: Microwaves (MWs) quickly deliver relatively high temperatures into tumors and cover a large ablation zone. We present a research protocol for using water-cooled double-needle MW ablation arrays for tumor ablation here.

Material And Methods: Our research program includes computer modeling, tissue-mimicking phantom experiments, and swine liver experiments.

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Vanadium hexacyanoferrate (VHCF) with an open-framework crystal structure is a promising cathode material for rechargeable aqueous metal-ion batteries owing to its high electrochemical performance and easy synthesis. In this paper, vanadium hexacyanoferrate cathodes were first used for constructing rechargeable aqueous sodium-ion batteries (VHCF/WO) and tested in the new-type electrolyte (NaP-4.6) consisting of a polyethylene glycol (PEG)/HO/NaClO electrolyte with a low H concentration (molar ratio of [HO]/[Na] is 4.

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In traditional materials science, structural disorder tends to break the symmetry of the lattice. In this work, however, we studied a case which may be opposite to this intuition. The prototypical phase change material, GeTe, undergoes the phase transition from the rhombohedral structure to a more symmetric cubic one at ∼625 K.

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G/Ag2S composites were synthesized for the first time by a hydrothermal method. X-ray diffraction, scanning electron microscopy, and transmission electron microscopy analysis demonstrated that Ag2S nanoparticles with a diameter of about 130 nm uniformly covered the graphene surfaces. G/Ag2S composites were dispersed in methyl methacrylate (MMA), polymerized at 75 °C for 30-35 min, and finally dried at 45 °C for 10 h, to afford G/Ag2S/PMMA organic glasses.

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