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

What new mysteries of life science will be solved by Chinese scientists in 2021? What secrets have been revealed about the coronavirus? What new medical breakthroughs offer hope for cancer treatment? Synthetic starch, COVID-19 prevention and control, nasopharyngeal cancer treatment and other achievements were included in the "Top 10 Advances in Life Sciences in China" for 2021, released by the Life Sciences Association of China Association for Science and Technology on Thursday. Compared with the previous selection, the selected results are more original, providing new ideas for the development of new life science technologies, new medical breakthroughs and the development of bioeconomy, showing the social impact of life science and related technologies.

Food brought about a subversive revolution in food production

Food is the life of the people. Eating well is the common pursuit of people, but the current food production is still inseparable from "relying on the sky to eat", what changes can life science and technology have, so as to provide new solutions for "food"? Of the ten major advances, two are related to "food".

Starch is the most important component of grain and also an important industrial raw material. Could we skip farming and make starches in the lab? The selected "Artificial synthesis from carbon dioxide to starch" is the first time in the world to achieve artificial synthesis of starch, which will have a transformative impact on the next generation of biological manufacturing and agricultural production. The research, carried out by the Tianjin Institute of Industrial Biotechnology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in collaboration with the Dalian Institute of Chemical Compounds and other units, subverted the complex process of starch synthesis in plants, surpassing the energy efficiency and speed of crops such as corn, and opened a window for the workshop manufacturing of starch. The study caused an international outcry and was considered a landmark breakthrough.

As one of the staple food in our country, rice has always been paid much attention to improve its yield. In 2021, Chinese scientists have made new breakthroughs in rice breeding. Li Jiayang's team at the Institute of Genetics and Developmental Biology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences first proposed a new strategy for rapid de nuo domestication of allotetraploid wild rice, and successfully created new tetraploid rice materials with different types of improved grain dropping, awning, plant height, grain length, stalk thickness, growth period, etc., breaking through all technical bottlenecks. This achievement opens up a new breeding direction, provides a new feasible path to deal with the future food crisis, and is expected to bring a subversive revolution to world food production.

The fight against COVID-19 has brought hope to the prevention and treatment of the disease

Two studies on the fight against the epidemic, "Study on the mechanism of the novel coronavirus escape host natural immunity and antiviral drugs" and "cross-species recognition and molecular mechanism of coronavirus", are of great significance to the complex situation of the international community today.

At present, the novel coronavirus pneumonia epidemic has lasted for two years, and the continuous emergence of mutant strains poses an urgent need for the development of broad-spectrum drugs. The "transcriptional replication complex" consists of viral replicase, which is responsible for the whole process of viral transcription and replication. It is highly conserved in each mutant strain and is the core target of developing broad-spectrum drugs. The research group of Academician Rao Zihe and Professor Lou Zhiyong of Tsinghua University has discovered and reconstructed the complete composition of the novel coronavirus transcription and replication machine for the first time in the world, providing a new target for the development of novel and safe broad-spectrum antiviral drugs, and providing a key scientific basis for optimizing antiviral drugs targeting polymerase.

In the last 20 years, humanity has suffered three major outbreaks caused by coronaviruses. Most coronavirus that infect humans come from animals, and the virus is often delayed in human-to-human transmission, and the threshold of disease prevention and control needs to move forward in "time". Therefore, in the top ten progress selected this time, another study on epidemic prevention focuses on preventing the outbreak caused by the new coronavirus.

The study, conducted by Gao Fu and his team at the Institute of Microbiology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, established efficient methods to evaluate the cross-species recognition ability of coronaviruses, and used these methods to evaluate the potential risk of cross-species transmission of bat-derived coronaviruses and pangolin-derived coronaviruses, and found that the above three coronaviruses have the potential risk of cross-species transmission. It is suggested that we should continue to monitor the coronavirus of animal origin.

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.

It is understood that since the selection of the China Association for Science and Technology Consortium of Life science societies began in 2015, the annual selection has been selected by senior experts in the fields of life science, biotechnology and clinical medicine, and has been reviewed by the presidium of the China Association for Science and Technology Consortium of life science societies, promoting China's life science research and technological innovation. So that more people are aware of the major scientific and technological achievements in the field of life science in our country.