Publications by authors named "Zhicong Yan"

Antibiotics threaten scleractinian corals, but their accumulation patterns and physiological effects on corals in natural reefs remain unclear. This study investigated antibiotic occurrence in seawater and two coral species, Galaxea fascicularis and Pocillopora damicornis, and explored the physiological effects of bioaccumulated antibiotics in a fringing reef of the South China Sea. Nineteen antibiotic components were detected in seawater, with total antibiotic concentrations (ΣABs) ranging from 17.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF
Article Synopsis
  • Researchers explored the connection between anxiety and adult-onset isolated dystonia (AOID), revealing unknown mechanisms behind psychiatric issues in AOID patients.
  • The study involved MRI scans of 69 AOID patients and 35 healthy controls, focusing on grey matter volume and brain activity using metrics like amplitude of low-frequency fluctuations (ALFF) and regional homogeneity (ReHo).
  • Findings showed that AOID patients with anxiety had significant increases in ALFF and ReHo in the left angular gyrus, with these metrics showing strong potential as biomarkers for diagnosing anxiety in this population.
View Article and Find Full Text PDF
Article Synopsis
  • The study investigates changes in white matter structural networks in patients with cervical dystonia (CD) compared to healthy controls using diffusion tensor imaging.
  • Results indicate that patients with CD exhibit increased local efficiency and assortativity in their network, along with a significant decrease in overall network strength.
  • The findings suggest a reorganization of white matter networks in CD patients, but the relationship between these changes and clinical symptoms remains unclear and requires further study.
View Article and Find Full Text PDF
Article Synopsis
  • The thalamus, a part of the brain, is important in understanding idiopathic cervical dystonia (iCD), a condition that causes neck muscle spasms.
  • Researchers used MRI scans to study 37 people with iCD compared to 37 healthy people, looking at different sections of the thalamus.
  • They found that certain parts of the thalamus were smaller in people with iCD, but these size changes didn't seem to relate to the symptoms they experienced.
View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Scleractinian corals are capable of accumulating polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) in reef environments; however, the mechanism behind their PAHs tolerance is unknown. This study investigated the occurrence and bioaccumulation of PAHs in coral reef ecosystems and examined the physiological responses induced by PAHs in coral hosts and their algal symbionts, the massive coral Galaxea fascicularis and branching coral Pocillopora damicornis. G.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF
Article Synopsis
  • The study investigates the role of different thalamic nuclei in patients with blepharospasm and blepharospasm-oromandibular dystonia, moving beyond the traditional view of the thalamus as a single structure.
  • It analyzes the grey matter volume in various thalamic subregions and explores causal relationships among them to find potential neuroimaging biomarkers for distinguishing between these conditions and healthy controls.
  • Results show that specific nuclei exhibited reduced grey matter volume in patients compared to healthy controls, correlating with clinical severity, and a machine learning approach achieved high accuracy in distinguishing patients from controls.
View Article and Find Full Text PDF
Article Synopsis
  • Blepharospasm is a focal dystonia with involuntary eye muscle spasms, which can be idiopathic or acquired due to brain lesions.
  • Researchers used imaging techniques to identify if these two types share a common brain network, finding that lesions linked to blepharospasm activated similar brain areas.
  • The study revealed that both idiopathic and acquired blepharospasm involve abnormal connectivity in the supplementary motor area, a region crucial for motor functions, highlighting its role in the condition.
View Article and Find Full Text PDF
Article Synopsis
  • A study investigated the neural mechanisms behind the impaired recognition of facial expressions of disgust in patients with blepharospasm, a type of focal dystonia.
  • Researchers compared 33 patients with blepharospasm to 33 healthy controls through facial emotion recognition tests and resting-state fMRI.
  • The findings revealed that blepharospasm patients performed worse in recognizing disgust and showed decreased functional connections in specific brain regions involved in perception processing, indicating that their difficulties in recognizing disgust could stem from impaired early visual processing.
View Article and Find Full Text PDF

As a well-known pseudo-persistent environmental pollutant, oxybenzone (BP-3) and its related organic ultraviolet (UV) filters have been verified to directly contribute to the increasing mortality rate of coral reefs. Previous studies have revealed the potential role of symbiotic Symbiodiniaceae in protecting corals from the toxic effects of UV filters. However, the detailed protection mechanism(s) have not been explained.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Blepharospasm is traditionally thought to be a movement disorder that results from basal ganglia dysfunction. Recently, accumulating morphometric studies have revealed structural alterations outside the basal ganglia, such as in the brainstem, cerebellum and sensorimotor cortex, suggesting that blepharospasm may result from network disorders. However, the temporal and causal relationships between structural alterations and whether there are disease duration-related hierarchical structural changes in these patients remain largely unknown.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Ocean acidification resulting from increased CO and pollution from land-sourced toxicants such as copper have been linked to coral cover declines in coastal reef ecosystems. The impacts of ocean acidification and copper pollution on corals have been intensively investigated, whereas research on their effects on coral endosymbiont Symbiodiniaceae is limited. In this study, reproduction, photosynthetic parameters, nutrient accumulation and metabolome of Symbiodiniaceae Cladocopium goreaui were investigated after a weeklong treatment with acute CO-induced acidification and copper ion.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

The growing number of neuroimaging studies of cynomolgus macaques require extending existing templates to facilitate species-specific application of voxel-wise neuroimaging methodologies. This study aimed to create population-averaged structural magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) templates for the cynomolgus macaques and apply the templates in fully automated voxel-wise analyses. We presented the development of symmetric and asymmetric MRI and DTI templates from a sample of 63 young male cynomolgus monkeys with the use of optimized template creation approaches.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Background: Accumulating evidence indicates regional structural changes in the white matter (WM) of brains in patients with blepharospasm (BSP); however, whether large-scale WM structural networks undergo widespread reorganization in these patients remains unclear.

Objective: We investigated topology changes and global and local features of large-scale WM structural networks in BSP patients compared with hemifacial spasm (HFS) patients or healthy controls (HCs).

Methods: This cross-sectional study applied graph theoretical analysis to assess deterministic diffusion tensor tractography findings in 41 BSP patients, 41 HFS patients, and 41 HCs.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Accumulating diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) evidence suggests that white matter abnormalities evaluated by local diffusion homogeneity (LDH) or fractional anisotropy (FA) occur in patients with blepharospasm (BSP), both of which are significantly correlated with disease severity. However, whether the individual severity of BSP can be identified using these DTI metrics remains unknown. We aimed to investigate whether a combination of machine learning techniques and LDH or FA can accurately identify the individual severity of BSP.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF