Publications by authors named "Zhihao Tan"

Clonal communities of single celled organisms, such as bacterial or fungal colonies and biofilms, are spatially structured, with subdomains of cells experiencing differing environmental conditions. In the development of such communities, cell specialization is not only important to respond and adapt to the local environment but has the potential to increase the fitness of the clonal community through division of labor. Here, we examine colony development in a yeast strain (F13) that produces colonies with a highly structured "ruffled" phenotype in the colony periphery and an unstructured "smooth" phenotype in the colony center.

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Article Synopsis
  • The study focuses on the leaf area-to-fruit ratio (LAFR) and its impact on the quality of pears, aiming to refine the broad recommendations for optimal LAFR values during the fruit development process.
  • Using five clustering algorithms, the research identified that Agglomerative clustering provided the best classification of fruit quality data into 4 clusters, leading to specific optimal LAFR values at various growth stages.
  • Field experiments confirmed that maintaining the optimal LAFR significantly enhances pear fruit quality, while exceeding this optimal level does not yield further improvements.
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Programmed death-1 (PD-1) and programmed death ligand-1 (PD-L1) are key immune checkpoints (ICs) that critically influence immunotherapy. Tumor resistance to single IC-targeting drugs has increased interest in dual-target drugs, which have shown feasibility for cancer treatment. In this study, we aimed to develop dual-target peptide drugs targeting the PD-1/PD-L1 pathway and to evaluate their efficacy compared to functional antibodies in enhancing the cytotoxicity of human T cells against tongue squamous carcinoma cell lines.

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Pollen grains, the male gametophytes for reproduction in higher plants, are vulnerable to various stresses that lead to loss of viability and eventually crop yield. A conventional method for assessing pollen viability is manual counting after staining, which is laborious and hinders high-throughput screening. We developed an automatic detection tool (PollenDetect) to distinguish viable and nonviable pollen based on the YOLOv5 neural network, which is adjusted to adapt to the small target detection task.

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Baker's yeast (Saccharomyces cerevisiae) is a model organism for studying the morphology that emerges at the scale of multi-cell colonies. To look at how morphology develops, we collect a dataset of time-lapse photographs of the growth of different strains of S. cerevisiae.

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Background: From an economic perspective, cotton is one of the most important crops in the world. The fertility of male reproductive organs is a key determinant of cotton yield. Anther dehiscence or indehiscence directly determines the probability of fertilization in cotton.

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The clinical utility of pharmacogenomics (PGx) has been gaining traction alongside growing evidence that adverse drug reactions (ADRs) have significant genetic associations. Nala PGx Core is a multi-gene qPCR-based panel of 20 allele variants, comprising 18 SNPs and two copy number markers across four pharmacogenes - , , and . In this study, we validated the performance of Nala PGx Core against benchmark methods, on the Singaporean and Indonesian populations.

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Although neuroimaging studies have shown that exogenous and endogenous attention are dissociable, only a few behavioural studies have explored their differential effects on visual sensitivity, and none have directly focused on visual appearance. Here, we show that exogenous and endogenous attention produces contrasting effects on apparent size. Participants performed a spatial pre-cueing comparative judgement task that had been frequently used to test the attentional effects on visual perception.

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Visually identifying effective bio-markers from human brain networks poses non-trivial challenges to the field of data visualization and analysis. Existing methods in the literature and neuroscience practice are generally limited to the study of individual connectivity features in the brain (e.g.

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Visualizing massive scale human movement in cities plays an important role in solving many of the problems that modern cities face (e.g., traffic optimization, business site configuration).

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Understanding how cells acquire genetic mutations is a fundamental biological question with implications for many different areas of biomedical research, ranging from tumor evolution to drug resistance. While karyotypic heterogeneity is a hallmark of cancer cells, few mutations causing chromosome instability have been identified in cancer genomes, suggesting a nongenetic origin of this phenomenon. We found that in vitro exposure of karyotypically stable human colorectal cancer cell lines to environmental stress conditions triggered a wide variety of chromosomal changes and karyotypic heterogeneity.

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Polyploidization, a common event during the evolution of different tumours, has been proposed to confer selective advantages to tumour cells by increasing the occurrence of mutations promoting cancer progression and by conferring chemotherapy resistance. While conditions leading to polyploidy in cancer cells have been described, a general mechanism explaining the incidence of this karyotypic change in tumours is still missing. In this study, we tested whether a widespread tumour microenvironmental condition, low pH, could induce polyploidization in mammalian cells.

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Biofilm formation by microorganisms is a major cause of recurring infections and removal of biofilms has proven to be extremely difficult given their inherent drug resistance . Understanding the biological processes that underlie biofilm formation is thus extremely important and could lead to the development of more effective drug therapies, resulting in better infection outcomes. Using the yeast as a biofilm model, overexpression screens identified , , , , , and as regulators of biofilm formation.

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Aneuploidy, a state in which the chromosome number deviates from a multiple of the haploid count, significantly impacts human health. The phenotypic consequences of aneuploidy are believed to arise from gene expression changes associated with the altered copy number of genes on the aneuploid chromosomes. To dissect the mechanisms underlying altered gene expression in aneuploids, we used RNA-seq to measure transcript abundance in colonies of the haploid Saccharomyces cerevisiae strain F45 and two aneuploid derivatives harboring disomies of chromosomes XV and XVI.

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Microorganisms often form multicellular structures such as biofilms and structured colonies that can influence the organism's virulence, drug resistance, and adherence to medical devices. Phenotypic classification of these structures has traditionally relied on qualitative scoring systems that limit detailed phenotypic comparisons between strains. Automated imaging and quantitative analysis have the potential to improve the speed and accuracy of experiments designed to study the genetic and molecular networks underlying different morphological traits.

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Although microorganisms are traditionally used to investigate unicellular processes, the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae has the ability to form colonies with highly complex, multicellular structures. Colonies with the "fluffy" morphology have properties reminiscent of bacterial biofilms and are easily distinguished from the "smooth" colonies typically formed by laboratory strains. We have identified strains that are able to reversibly toggle between the fluffy and smooth colony-forming states.

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The non-structural protein NS1 of the influenza A virus is a good target for the development of diagnostic assays. In this study, three NS1 monoclonal antibodies (mAbs) were generated by using recombinant NS1 protein of H5N1 virus and found to bind both the native and denatured forms of NS1. Two of the mAbs, 6A4 and 2H6, bind NS1 of three different strains of influenza A virus, namely H1N1, H3N2, and H5N1.

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