Journal of Zhejiang University SCIENCE B最新文献

Pseudomonas aeruginosa belongs to the genus Pseudomonas and is a common Gram-negative, exclusively aerobic, conditionally pathogenic bacterium with the characteristics of easy colonization, mutation, and multidrug resistance (Deng et al., 2015; Azam and Khan, 2019; Jurado-Martín et al., 2021). It is mainly distributed in the air, soil, water, intestinal tract, and skin surface of humans and domestic animals and can cause complications such as ulcerative keratitis, otitis externa, skin and soft tissue infections, respiratory infections, sepsis, osteomyelitis, endocarditis, and urinary tract infections in burned or immunocompromised patients (Azam and Khan, 2019; Chai and Xu, 2020; Voth et al., 2020). P. aeruginosa is a naturally drug-resistant bacterium that is resistant to a wide range of antibiotics, making it one of the major opportunistic pathogens leading to in-hospital infections (Pang et al., 2019; Chai and Xu, 2020; Reynolds and Kollef, 2021). According to the surveillance report of the China Antimicrobial Resistance Surveillance System (CARSS, http://www.carss.cn), Gram-negative bacteria accounted for more than 70% of all bacterial infections, and P. aeruginosa accounted for 12.4%, 12.0%, and 12.2% in 2018, 2019, and 2020, respectively. Therefore, P. aeruginosa infection has become an important concern in public health care, and it is particularly important to gain insight into the means of host immune defense against P. aeruginosa infection.

Biotechnology policies and regulations must be revised and updated to reflect the most recent advances in plant-breeding technology. New Plant Breeding Techniques (NPBT) such as gene editing have been applied to address the myriad of challenges in plant breeding, while the use of NPBT as emerging biotechnological tools raises legal and ethical concerns. This study aims to highlight how gene editing is operationalized in the existing literature and examine the critical issues of ethical and legal issues of gene editing for plant breeding. We carried out a systematic literature review (SLR) to provide the current states of ethical and legal discourses surrounding this topic. We also identified critical research priority areas and policy gaps that must be addressed when designing the future governance of gene editing in plant breeding.

Abiotic stresses, predominately drought, heat, salinity, cold, and waterlogging, adversely affect cereal crops. They limit barley production worldwide and cause huge economic losses. In barley, functional genes under various stresses have been identified over the years and genetic improvement to stress tolerance has taken a new turn with the introduction of modern gene-editing platforms. In particular, clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats (CRISPR)/CRISPR-associated protein 9 (Cas9) is a robust and versatile tool for precise mutation creation and trait improvement. In this review, we highlight the stress-affected regions and the corresponding economic losses among the main barley producers. We collate about 150 key genes associated with stress tolerance and combine them into a single physical map for potential breeding practices. We also overview the applications of precise base editing, prime editing, and multiplexing technologies for targeted trait modification, and discuss current challenges including high-throughput mutant genotyping and genotype dependency in genetic transformation to promote commercial breeding. The listed genes counteract key stresses such as drought, salinity, and nutrient deficiency, and the potential application of the respective gene-editing technologies will provide insight into barley improvement for climate resilience.

Oral leukoplakia is a common precursor lesion of oral squamous cell carcinoma, which indicates a high potential of malignancy. The malignant transformation of oral leukoplakia seriously affects patient survival and quality of life; however, it is difficult to identify oral leukoplakia patients who will develop carcinoma because no biomarker exists to predict malignant transformation for effective clinical management. As a major problem in the field of head and neck pathologies, it is imperative to identify biomarkers of malignant transformation in oral leukoplakia. In this review, we discuss the potential biomarkers of malignant transformation reported in the literature and explore the translational probabilities from bench to bedside. Although no single biomarker has yet been applied in the clinical setting, profiling for genomic instability might be a promising adjunct.