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

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.