Ten major advances in China's life sciences in 2022 were announced



Life is like a "book" full of mysteries, and the revelation of its new mysteries is the goal of life science research, which can promote the development of new technologies, new medical breakthroughs and the development of the bioeconomy. The China Association for Science and Technology Life Science Association announced the top 10 advances in China's life sciences in 2022 on Monday. Ten original and socially significant scientific achievements were selected, focusing on how the Omicron strain of the novel coronavirus achieves immune escape in the human body; Global warming, how can rice resist high temperature, not yield reduction; The new progress in the treatment of cardiovascular and cerebrovascular diseases, diabetes and other diseases is oriented to people's life and health and the hot issues of scientific research in the world, and the decoding of the "book of life" will be further promoted.

Solve hot issues such as COVID-19 immune escape, rice resistance to high temperature, and understanding cells

The continuous mutation of the Omicron strain of the new coronavirus has caused multiple rounds of outbreaks around the world, which is a hot issue that everyone is concerned about at present. At present, the analysis of the humoral immune escape mechanism of COVID-19 mutants is very important for the development of broad-spectrum COVID-19 vaccines and antibody drugs. Among the ten advances announced this time, Xie Xiaoliang and Cao Yunlong's team from Peking University, together with Wang Xiangxi's team from the Institute of Biophysics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and Wang Youchun's team from the China National Institute of Food and Drug Control, have improved the scientific understanding of the world's novel coronavirus prevention and control.

They were the first to report the humoral immune escape characteristics and molecular mechanisms of novel coronavirus Omicron and its subtype variants. For the first time, the structural and infective characteristics of several mutant strains were analyzed, and the full epitope distribution and escape map of COVID-19 neutralizing antibodies were described in detail.

Rice is one of the main grains in our country, and the research on rice has always attracted much attention. With global warming, extreme high temperature weather will greatly reduce rice production and exacerbate food security problems. The team led by Lin Hongxuan from the Center for Excellence in Molecular Plant Science, Chinese Academy of Sciences, and Lin Youshun from Shanghai Jiao Tong University have jointly revealed a new mechanism of rice high-temperature resistance, and excavated rice high-temperature resistance genes, which provide precious genetic resources for crop high-temperature resistance breeding, and help to solve the current urgent problem of breeding heat-resistant crop varieties.

Chinese scientists' research on small cells can attract more than 190 scientific research teams from 25 countries to participate? Yes, this is the research of Wang Jian and Xu Xun's team from the Institute of Life Sciences of the University of China. Based on autonomous DNA nanosphere sequencing technology, they developed high-precision large-field spatial transcriptome technology, which promoted the resolution of understanding life to the sub-cellular level of 500nm, which increased the resolution by 200 times and the field of view size by 483 times compared with similar technologies in the past. Together with a number of domestic scientific research teams, they also drew the highest precision and most comprehensive spatio-temporal gene expression data set of important model organisms such as mice, fruit flies, zebrafish, Arabidopsis and salamander for the first time in the world, and discovered new cell types that play a key regulatory role in the process, which caused a warm international response.

Bring good news to patients with cardiovascular and cerebrovascular diseases and diabetes

The study and treatment of diseases has always been the focus of life science research. Among the ten advances announced this time, a number of studies focused on the treatment of cardiovascular, cerebrovascular, diabetes and other diseases, bringing good news to these patients.

There are 330 million patients with cardiovascular disease in China, and excessive cholesterol in the blood is the main risk factor. Although existing lipid-lowering drugs can reduce lipids to different degrees, they have certain side effects and limitations. Cholesterol is difficult to be degraded in the body, so discovering how to expel cholesterol to the body is of great significance for the development of new lipid-lowering drugs. The team of Song Baoliang, Taikang Life Medical Center of Wuhan University, found that after the loss of glycoprotein receptor ASGR1, cholesterol is excreted into the bile and further left the body through the stool. The findings indicate the direction for the development of new lipid-lowering drugs that promote cholesterol efflux.

In the treatment of cerebrovascular diseases, high recurrence is a global problem in the prevention and treatment of ischemic cerebrovascular diseases, but the effect of aspirin single antiplatelet therapy recommended by national guidelines is limited, and clinical studies of combined antiplatelet therapy with other drugs have failed due to ineffective or increased risk of serious bleeding, so combined therapy has been banned for ischemic cerebrovascular diseases by international guidelines. Wang Yongjun's team of Beijing Tiantan Hospital affiliated to Capital Medical University proposed for the first time in the world the short-range double-channel double-effect combination treatment program of aspirin plus clopidogrel, which rewrote the guidelines of many countries such as Europe and the United States. The program can reduce the risk of recurrence by 23%, and is evaluated as opening a new era of gene-guided treatment of cerebrovascular disease.

Diabetes patients are no strangers to metformin, which is not only the first-line drug for the treatment of type 2 diabetes, but also has anti-tumor, anti-aging and other magical effects. But for 65 years, its target has remained a mystery. The Xiamen University Lin team found that a protein called PEN2 is the target of metformin. Importantly, this study not only identified the direct target of metformin, but also mapped out the road map of metformin's function from a molecular perspective. They also screened a chemical drug (commonly known as "Gu Jing") that can simulate the effect of Gu Gu (calorie restriction), which has the effect of lowering sugar, treating fatty liver, and extending life span.

New progress has been made in the study of early human embryo development and genome

Human beings themselves contain countless mysteries of life science - how does the development of the early embryo start? What is the function of each human genome? How do cells clean up "junk" such as misfolded proteins and damaged organelles? For these problems, the selected scientific research results have made some new progress.

After fertilization of the human egg, the early embryo is basically in a state of transcriptional silence at first, and translation regulation plays an important role in ovum maturation, fertilization and embryo genome activation. As the first gene expression of life, zygotic genome activation is a landmark event in the initiation of embryonic development. However, how the human zygotic genome is activated has long been an unsolved mystery. Professor Wei Jie of Tsinghua University, Academician Zijiang Chen and Professor Han Zhao of Shandong University have mapped the translation map of early human embryonic development for the first time. This work addresses the fundamental scientific question of how the human embryo procedure was first initiated, and provides an important theoretical basis and research tool for the future treatment of infertility and the improvement of assisted reproductive technology.

The human genome has long been sequenced, but its function is still poorly understood, which seriously hinders the diagnosis and treatment of diseases. The Chi Tian team of Shanghai University of Science and Technology has developed a subversive "high-throughput, pan-organization" gene function decoding technology iMAP, which can increase the decoding speed of mouse genes by at least 100 times, and successfully described the world's first "disturbance map", which shows the basic functions of 90 protein-coding genes in 39 kinds of tissue cells. The future will give birth to a "panoramic disturbance map" that covers all genes and organizations and decodes the entire "book of life", which will become an indispensable "world map" for people to explore the mysteries of life in the future.

Cells clean up their own internal "garbage", autophagy plays a "scavenger" function - by the cell's misfolded proteins, damaged organelles and other "garbage" wrapped in a double membrane structure called the autophagosome, they are transported to the lysosomes, where they can be degraded and recycled. Finding the signal that determines the formation of autophagosomes is a long-standing problem in the field of autophagy. Zhang Hong's team at the Institute of Biophysics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, found that when autophagy is induced, calcium transients occur on the surface of the endoplasmic reticulum and trigger a series of related reactions. This study has greatly promoted the understanding of the molecular mechanism of autophagy, and has important implications for exploring neurodegenerative diseases caused by calcium disorders in the endoplasmic reticulum.

Over the course of a long life, rodents accumulate 3.2 to 3.5 chromosome rearrangements every million years, and primates accumulate 1.6. How can such events be simulated and studied in laboratory model animals? The team of Li Wei and Zhou Qi from the Institute of Zoology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, together with the team of Li Jinsong from the Innovation Center for Molecular and Cell Science of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, achieved the programmable connection of complete chromosomes of mammals for the first time, creating a series of experimental mice with a new karyotype of 19 pairs of chromosomes. By artificially designing in the laboratory karyotype evolution events that take hundreds to tens of thousands of years to achieve in nature, the study opens a new field of genetic modification of mammalian chromosomes.