The Top 10 Advances in China's Life Sciences in 2021 were released

Solve the mystery of how ancient creatures evolved, why birds do not get lost in migration

How did ancient fish evolve to land? Why do birds on Earth migrate so far without getting lost? In 2021, scientists in China are one step closer to unlocking more of life's secrets.

The team of Wang Wen and Wang Kun from the School of Ecology and Environment of Northwestern Polytechnical University, in cooperation with He Shunping from the Institute of Hydrobiology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and Zhang Guojie from the Kunming Institute of Zoology, found that the ancestors of bony fish had evolved the relevant preliminary genetic basis for adapting to land, and it was further strengthened in the meal-finned fish, and eventually evolved into tetrapods and successfully landed on land. This provides key insights and data to unlock the genetic innovation mechanism of how vertebrates evolved from aquatic to terrestrial more than 400 million years ago.

The formation process, maintenance mechanism and future trend of bird migration routes under climate change, as well as the genetic basis of migration strategies, have been the focus and difficulty of academic research. A team from the Institute of Zoology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Zhan Xiangjiang, has spent 12 years integrating years of satellite tracking data and population genome information to establish a continent-scale migration research system for Arctic peregrine falcons. It not only elucidates the driving role of climate change in the formation, maintenance and future change trend of bird migration routes, but also reveals that long-term memory may be an important basis for long-distance migration of birds. The study fully integrates new research methods such as remote sensing satellite tracking, genomics, and neurobiology, demonstrating the key role of interdisciplinary innovative research in answering major scientific questions.

There is a new treatment for nasopharyngeal cancer

Nasopharyngeal cancer is a tumor with "Chinese characteristics", accounting for half of the new cases in the world. Small residual tumors in the whole body after radiotherapy are the root cause of treatment failure, and due to the poor physical condition of patients after radiotherapy, it is difficult to tolerate the previous high-intensity traditional chemotherapy (the completion rate is only about 40%-50%), which becomes the bottleneck restricting the improvement of curative effect.

Life science research can provide new treatments in the fight against cancer. Ma Jun's research team at Sun Yat-sen University's Cancer Prevention and Control Center has proposed a metronome chemotherapy model of small-dose, long-term oral cytotoxic drug capecitabine. This treatment method can continuously inhibit tumor by anti-angiogenesis, killing tumor stem cells and other mechanisms, while improving body tolerance. Clinical studies have found that the use of this method after radiotherapy can significantly reduce the risk of failure by 45%, and the incidence of serious side effects is reduced by three-fifths, and the completion rate is 74%. At the same time, this method is convenient and easy to popularize to the grassroots. Thus, the study broke the bottleneck of the efficacy of traditional chemotherapy and established a new standard for the treatment of nasopharyngeal cancer that is internationally leading, efficient, low toxic and simple.

Cutting-edge gene regulation, nanoscale microscopy, and related achievements in brain science were selected

There are also three top 10 achievements, all focusing on the core and cutting-edge issues of international life science research.

The research results of Yanhui Xu's team at Fudan University reveal why transcription occurs on the promoter of almost all genes, subvert the traditional understanding of promoter recognition and transcription initiation complex assembly, and have important implications for understanding gene expression regulation and related physiological and pathological processes.

The technical research team composed of Academician Xu Tao Group and Ji Wei group of the Institute of Biophysics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences has been focusing on the research of breaking the resolution of optical microscopic imaging, and their research results can resolve the sub-cellular structure of the nanoscale, providing a powerful tool for life science research. The research shows that the optical microscope has entered the era of nanometer resolution, and Chinese scientists have the ability of interdisciplinary technological innovation in this field, and the new super-resolution imaging equipment with independent intellectual property rights is in the leading position in the world.

The team of Peng Hanchuan, Gu Zhongze and Xie Wei from the Institute of Brain Science and Intelligent Technology of Southeast University established the world's first complete whole brain single neuron resolution big data and informatics platform and applied it to the whole mouse brain research. Their research continues to play an important role in brain cell typing and function, brain connectivity circuits, whole-brain large-scale simulation, brain-like computing, and new artificial intelligence algorithms and systems based on biological brains.