Top 10 Progress in China's Life Sciences in 2022 released

Song Baoliang's team at Wuhan University Taikang Life Medical Center found that after the loss of the glycoprotein receptor ASGR1, cholesterol is excreted into the bile and further left the body through the stool. Inhibition of ASGR1 function can promote a large number of cholesterol effluents, blood lipids and liver fat decrease, and play a good effect on atherosclerosis. At the same time, the neutralizing antibody of ASGR1 can be combined with existing lipid-lowering drugs to play a better lipid-lowering effect. This finding points the way for the development of new lipid-lowering drugs to promote cholesterol effluents, and ASGR1 has become a hot target for many pharmaceutical companies to develop lipid-lowering drugs.

Inhibition of ASGR1 promotes cholesterol excretion into bile and stool and prevents atherosclerotic plaque formation Inhibition of ASGR1 promotes cholesterol excretion into bile and stool and prevents atherosclerotic plaque formation

3. New technologies of mammalian chromosome engineering and artificial evolution of chromosomes

During the long evolution of life, chromosomal rearrangement occurs, resulting in karyotype variation. Rodents accumulate 3.2-3.5 chromosome rearrangements every million years, while 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. Events of karyotype evolution that take hundreds to tens of thousands of years to achieve in nature have been achieved in the laboratory by artificial design. The study found limitations in chromosome length; The effect of chromosome rearrangement on reproduction was revealed. It is confirmed that the robustness of genome assembly is an important basis for chromosome evolution, which provides a feasible technical route for the modification of mammalian chromosome structure, the creation of new karyotype subspecies and the simulation of diseases with chromosome structural variation, and opens a new field of mammalian chromosome genetic modification.

Chromosome connected mouse "Xiao Zhu" has a unique chromosome type Chromosome connected mouse "Xiao Zhu" has a unique chromosome type

4. Study on translation group map of early human embryo and activation factors of zygotic genome

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.

The research team of Professor Wei Jie of Tsinghua University, Academician Zijiang Chen and Professor Han Zhao of Shandong University has mapped the translation map of early human embryo development for the first time by developing the combined sequencing technology of ultra-sensitive translation group and transcriptome. This work identified TPRX1/2/L family proteins by searching for transcription factors with high translation during genome activation, demonstrating that they play an important regulatory role in human zygotic genome activation and early embryonic development. The work addresses major fundamental scientific questions about how human embryo procedures were first initiated, and provides an important theoretical foundation and research tool for future treatments of infertility and improved assisted reproductive technologies.

The human egg and early embryo translation group and transcriptome were jointly sequenced to reveal the translation regulation mechanism and key factors of zygotic genome activation

5. High-precision panoramic space-time gene expression mapping of life

Cells are the basic functional units of life. Analysis of cell type, localization, and intercellular communication is critical to understanding organ function, ontogeny, human disease, and organ evolution in species.

Based on autonomous DNA nanosphere sequencing technology, a team led by Wang Jian and Xu Xun from BGI Institute of Life Sciences 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 size of the field of view by 483 times compared with similar technologies in the past. Based on this technology, a team from BTU, the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Southern University of Science and Technology, Huazhong Agricultural University and Guangdong Provincial People's Hospital has mapped for the first time in the world the highest precision and most comprehensive spatio-temporal gene expression dataset to date for important model organisms such as mice, fruit flies, zebrafish, Arabidopsis and salamander, and discovered new cell types that play a key regulatory role in the process. After the publication of this series of results, the international community has aroused a warm response, promoting the establishment of STOC, a global alliance of spatiotemporal omics led by Chinese scientists, which has attracted the participation of more than 190 research teams from 25 countries.