Biomedical subjects

Ying Zhou

Publications and source records attributed to Ying Zhou.

8 recordsLinked to original sources

PubMed2026

Effects of Short-Term Energy Limitation at Different Levels With Normal Protein Intake on Hepatic Lipid Metabolism and the Gut Microbiota in Overweight/Obese Mice.

This study investigated the sex-specific effects of graded short-term energy limitation (EL) with normal protein intake on hepatic lipid metabolism and the gut microbiota in overweight/obese mice. Mice were allocated to a normal control (NC) group, a high-fat diet model (MC) group, and groups receiving 20%, 30% or 40% EL (n = 8 per group). All mice underwent blood biochemistry, liver biochemistry, histological, liver metabolomic, and fecal microbiota community genomic analyses. Relative to the NC group, both male and female MC mice developed varying degrees of insulin resistance, dyslipidaemia, and sex hormone dysregulation. However, disrupted hepatic lipid metabolism was detected solely in male mice, in association with changes in key lipid-metabolizing enzymes and metabolites; female mice showed only disturbed total cholesterol (TC) metabolism, which was linked to alterations in the cholesterol synthesis rate-limiting enzyme HMGCR. With normal protein intake, 20%, 30%, and 40% EL reduced hepatic triglyceride and TC synthesis in overweight/obese male mice by suppressing the expression of the key lipogenic enzyme DGAT and the activities of ACC and HMGCR (p < 0.05). An effect on the lipolytic enzymes CPT1 and CYP7A1 was detected only at 30% EL (p < 0.05), and hepatic metabolite profiles varied with the degree of EL. In female mice, only 40% EL significantly decreased TC synthesis by inhibiting both HMGCR expression and enzymatic activity (p < 0.05). Furthermore, irrespective of sex, short-term EL (all levels) with normal protein intake reduced the gut Firmicutes/Bacteroidetes ratio in overweight/obese mice (p < 0.05). In conclusion, graded short-term EL with adequate protein intake exerts differential effects on hepatic lipid metabolism and the gut microbiota in overweight/obese mice, with pronounced sex-specific differences.

energy limitation↗

PubMed2026

Digital Structured Education With Behavioral Nudge Tools for Adults With Type 2 Diabetes: Multicenter Randomized Controlled Trial.

BACKGROUND: Digital interventions offer scalable alternatives to traditional face-to-face diabetes education, but often face challenges related to inconsistent clinical effectiveness, and declining user engagement. However, whether a digital structured education program integrated with behavioral nudge tools can improve metabolic, behavioral, and psychological outcomes in adults with type 2 diabetes remains unclear. OBJECTIVE: This study aimed to evaluate the effectiveness of a digital structured education program integrated with behavioral nudge tools in improving metabolic, behavioral, and psychological outcomes among adults with type 2 diabetes. METHODS: This multicenter randomized controlled trial was conducted in the endocrinology departments of 4 hospitals in China. Adults with type 2 diabetes were randomly assigned to an intervention group receiving a digital structured education program integrated with behavioral nudge tools (n=146) or a control group receiving standard digital diabetes education (n=147). Assessments were conducted at baseline and 12-week follow-up. The primary outcome was hemoglobin A1c (HbA1c) at 12 weeks, adjusted for baseline HbA1c, and study center. Secondary outcomes included fasting blood glucose (FBG), weight, BMI, waist circumference, blood pressure, lipid profiles, self-management behaviors, self-efficacy, and habit strength. RESULTS: Among 293 participants (mean age 49.19, SD 10.02 y), 287 (97.9%) completed follow-up. At 12 weeks, the intervention group demonstrated significantly greater improvements than the control group in HbA1c (adjusted mean difference -0.38%, 95% CI -0.68% to -0.09%; P=.01), FBG (adjusted mean difference -0.75, 95% CI -1.27 to -0.44 mmol/L; P<.001), weight (adjusted mean difference -0.84, 95% CI -1.61 to -0.07 kg; P=.03), BMI (adjusted mean difference -0.38, 95% CI -0.65 to -0.11 kg/m²; P=.01), systolic blood pressure (adjusted mean difference -2.71, 95% CI -4.62 to -0.79 mm Hg; P=.01), diastolic blood pressure (adjusted mean difference -2.92, 95% CI -4.47 to -1.37 mm Hg; P<.001), and total cholesterol (adjusted mean difference -0.27, 95% CI -0.48 to -0.05 mmol/L; P=.02). The intervention was also associated with significantly greater improvements in self-management behaviors, self-efficacy, and habit strength (all P<.05). CONCLUSIONS: Digital structured education integrated with behavioral nudge tools improved metabolic outcomes and strengthened psychological and behavioral determinants of self-management among adults with type 2 diabetes over a 12-week period. These findings suggest that a digital structured education program integrated with behavioral nudge tools may enhance diabetes self-management beyond standard digital diabetes education. Further studies with longer follow-up and real-world implementation are warranted to evaluate the sustainability, generalizability, and long-term clinical impact of this integrated intervention.

Humans↗

PubMed2026

Construction of an infectious clone of Spodoptera frugiperda densovirus and its biological characteristics.

Densoviruses are highly pathogenic to their insect hosts and have great potential for biocontrol. Spodoptera frugiperda densovirus (SfDV) was isolated from diseased larvae of Spodoptera frugiperda, while its biological functions remain unclear. Herein, we successfully constructed an infectious clone of SfDV. The S. frugiperda larvae transfected with the infectious clone exhibited anorexia, stunted growth, and reduced activity. Histopathological analysis further showed that the epidermis, fat body and trachea were infected instead of muscle and midgut tissues. Transmission electron microscopy (TEM) revealed that numerous virions of about 22 nm were distributed within both the nucleoplasm and cytoplasm of epidermal cells. Moreover, many virions were also found contained within vesicles in the cytoplasm. The replication kinetics of the rescued SfDV (rSfDV) was similar to that of the parental SfDV. The median lethal dose (LD50) and median lethal time (LT50) values of rSfDV were 6.63 × 107 viral genome copies (vgc), 5.23 d, respectively, which were also comparable to those of the parental SfDV. Taken together, the infectious clone of SfDV provides an important tool for further exploring the genome function, pathogenesis, and interactions with its hosts.

Animals↗

PubMed2026

Pseudotargeted peptidomics approach for identifying species-specific biomarkers in fermented Cordyceps products: A case study on Bailing Capsule.

Bailing Capsule, a fermented Cordyceps product used as an adjunctive treatment for chronic kidney disease and chronic bronchitis, is a crucial substitute for wild Ophiocordyceps. However, its current quality control relies on non-specific small-molecule markers, making it hard to distinguish from other analogous products. In this study, a pseudotargeted peptidomics strategy was developed to discover characteristic peptides for differentiation. Firstly, digested peptides were obtained by trypsin digestion (37 °C, 24 h, enzyme/protein ratio 1: 50) and profiled by ultra-high performance liquid chromatography-quadrupole time-of-flight mass spectrometry (UPLC-Q/TOF-MS). Subsequently, a multiple reaction monitoring (MRM) transition list was generated from the Q-TOF data using a "MRM-Ion Pair Finder" tool. These transitions were validated by ultra-high performance liquid chromatography triple-quadrupole mass spectrometry (UPLC-QQQ-MS) with 48 batches of samples from Bailing Capsule and four other analogous products. As a result, a total of 150 characteristic transitions specific to Bailing Capsule were identified, of which 76 peptide sequences were elucidated, and 12 peptide biomarkers were confirmed using synthetic standards. This pseudotargeted approach exhibits broad coverage and good sensitivity. Without requiring prior knowledge of peptide sequence, the transition-driven strategy reduces redundancy and enables focused, transition-based peptide differentiation. Compared to conventional small-molecule biomarkers, this peptide-based approach offers species-specific identification. This study demonstrates that a pseudotargeted peptidomics strategy may aid in the quality control of fermented Cordyceps products.

Cordyceps↗

PubMed2026

FuFiHLA: a tool for full-field HLA typing from long-read data.

MOTIVATION: Allele typing for Human Leukocyte Antigen (HLA) genes has many important clinical applications. Popular short-read typing can only accurately distinguish alleles at the coding sequence level, which potentially limit our understanding of the effect of variants in non-coding region. Long read data has been proved to be useful in typing HLA alleles in full resolution, but only a few tools are publicly available and with significant limitations in practical application. RESULTS: We developed FuFiHLA, a lightweight open-source software, to type HLA alleles. Currently it supports typing alleles of six HLA genes (HLA-A, HLA-B, HLA-C, HLA-DRB1, HLA-DQA1, and HLA-DQB1) from long reads. Evaluation using 233 PacBio HiFi WGS samples from HPRC shows that FuFiHLA achieves 99.6% accuracy in the full field allele typing and QV as 51.8 for consensus allele sequence construction. Additional testing on four Nanopore R10 reads demonstrates slightly reduced accuracy in the fourth field. AVAILABILITY: FuFiHLA is available at https://github.com/jingqing-hu/FuFiHLA under MIT License.

Humans↗

PubMed2025

A complete diploid human genome benchmark for personalized genomics.

Human genome resequencing typically involves mapping reads to a reference genome to call variants; however, this approach suffers from both technical and reference biases, leaving many duplicated and structurally polymorphic regions of the genome unmapped. Consequently, existing variant benchmarks, generated by the same methods, fail to assess these complex regions. To address this limitation, we present a telomere-to-telomere genome benchmark that achieves near-perfect accuracy (i.e. no detectable errors) across 99.4% of the complete, diploid HG002 genome. This benchmark adds 701.4 Mb of autosomal sequence and both sex chromosomes (216.8 Mb), totaling 15.3% of the genome that was absent from prior benchmarks. We also provide a diploid annotation of genes, transposable elements, segmental duplications, and satellite repeats, including 39,144 protein-coding genes across both haplotypes. To facilitate application of the benchmark, we developed tools for measuring the accuracy of sequencing reads, phased variant call sets, and genome assemblies against a diploid reference. Genome-wide analyses show that state-of-the-art de novo assembly methods resolve 2-7% more sequence and outperform variant calling accuracy by an order of magnitude, yielding just one error per 100 kb across 99.9% of the benchmark regions. Adoption of genome-based benchmarking is expected to accelerate the development of cost-effective methods for complete genome sequencing, expanding the reach of genomic medicine to the entire genome and enabling a new era of personalized genomics.

Journal Article↗

PubMed2025

SNORA47 affects stemness and chemotherapy sensitivity via EBF3/RPL11/c-Myc axis in luminal A breast cancer.

Chemotherapy sensitivity is an important factor that restricts the prognosis of breast cancer, and breast cancer stem cells (BCSCs) are the root cause of chemotherapy sensitivity. SNORA47, a member of the small nucleolar RNAs, has not been documented in the context of breast cancer, although it has been reported in lung cancer. In this study, high SNORA47 expression was linked to unfavorable survival outcomes among patients with Luminal A breast cancer in The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA). Among Luminal A patients, an elevated expression of SNORA47 correlated with high TNM stage (P = 0.049). SNORA47 was strongly associated with breast cancer stemness phenotype and tumor sensitivity in vivo and in vitro. Our findings demonstrated that SNORA47, through its interaction with early B-cell factor 3(EBF3), facilitated the translocation of ribosomal protein L11(RPL11), which as a modulator that subsequently regulates the expression levels of the oncogene c-Myc. These discoveries provided novel insights into the molecular mechanisms of breast cancer progression and suggested potential therapeutic targets for overcoming drug sensitivity by disrupting the SNORA47-EBF3-RPL11 axis.

Humans↗

PubMed2025

IL-7-mediated expansion of autologous lymphocytes increases CD8+ VLA-4 expression and accumulation in glioblastoma models.

The efficacy of T cell-activating therapies against glioma is limited by an immunosuppressive tumor microenvironment and tumor-induced T cell sequestration. We investigated whether peripherally infused non-antigen specific autologous lymphocytes (ALT) could accumulate in intracranial tumors. We observed that non-specific autologous CD8+ ALT cells can indeed accumulate in this context, despite endogenous T cell sequestration in bone marrow. Rates of intratumoral accumulation were markedly increased when expanding lymphocytes with IL-7 compared to IL-2. Pre-treatment with IL-7 ALT also enhanced the efficacy of multiple tumor-specific and non-tumor-specific T cell-dependent immunotherapies against orthotopic murine and human xenograft gliomas. Mechanistically, we detected increased VLA-4 on mouse and human CD8+ T cells following IL-7 expansion, with increased transcription of genes associated with migratory integrin expression (CD9). We also observed that IL-7 increases S1PR1 transcription in human CD8+ T cells, which we have shown to be protective against tumor-induced T cell sequestration. These observations demonstrate that expansion with IL-7 enhances the capacity of ALT to accumulate within intracranial tumors, and that pre-treatment with IL-7 ALT can boost the efficacy of subsequent T cell-activating therapies against glioma. Our findings will inform the development of future clinical trials where ALT pre-treatment can be combined with T cell-activating therapies.

Cell migration/adhesion↗