纳米生物技术

纳米生物技术将纳米技术和生物技术有机集成 ,将成为现代生物工程的重要组成部分 ,简要介绍纳米生物技术中的纳米生物材料 ,生物芯片、分子马达、纳米探针等方面的最新进展。     

Thyroid FNA: Challenges and Opportunities

No abstract available.     

Amoeboid Chemotaxis: Future Challenges and Opportunities

Chemotaxis is the directed movement of a cell towards a gradient of chemicals such as chemokines or growth factors. This phenomenon can be studied in organisms ranging from bacteria to mammalian cells, and here we will focus on eukaryotic amoeboid chemotaxis. Chemotactic responses are mediated by two major classes of receptors: GPCR''s and RTK''s, with multiple pathways signaling downstream of them, certain ones functioning in parallel. In this review we address two important features of amoeboid chemotaxis that will be important for further advances in the field. First, the application of in vivo imaging will be critical for providing insight into the functional requirements for chemotactic responses. We will briefly cover a number of systems in which in vivo imaging is providing new insights. Second, due to the network-type design of signaling pathways of eukaryotic chemotaxis, more refined phenotypic analysis will be necessary, and we will discuss recent analyses of the role of the phosphoinositide 3-kinase pathway in this light. We will close with some speculations regarding future applications of more detailed in vivo analysis and mechanistic understanding of eukaryotic amoeboid chemotaxis.Key Words: chemotaxis, signaling, in vivo models, development, phospholipase, phosphoinositide 3-kinase     

新一代植物志:机遇与挑战

植物多样性是地球生态系统和人类赖以生存的基础,植物资源是我国经济社会可持续发展不可或缺的条件。植物志(Flora)是植物多样性保护和可持续利用最为基础的植物典籍,它为物种的准确鉴定提供了必要的前提和保证,为合理利用植物资源提供了重要的信息和科学依据,在服务于我国国民经济和社会发展,提高公众对生物多样性的认识等方面发挥着重要作用。     

超声分子成像：机遇与挑战

随着分子生物学、蛋白组学、基因组学、计算机工程学等学科的不断进步,交叉融合,分子成像逐渐登上历史的舞台,成为研究热点。而超声分子成像随之迅猛发展,近年来超声微泡制备技术的成熟和超声造影检查技术的不断进步,超声造影不再局限获取组织的血流灌注信息,而是逐渐成为特异性的超声分子成像。目前使用超声对比剂研究分子成像和靶向治疗仍处于初级阶段。但是,各种分子成像技术的不断革新和发展,超声分子成像面临着重大的挑战,而在挑战背后同样面临着难逢的机遇。超声医学和分子生物学的迅猛发展,超声分子成像必将成为诊断和治疗疾病的新的手段和方法。超声造影剂仍有许多未能解决的问题,像如何延长微泡的半衰期、如何增强微泡的敏感性和特异性,如何增强目的基因的表达,如何处理组织损伤和高频超声之间的关系等问题,但是如果能解决这些问题,超声造影在现代医学的诊断和治疗中将起到重要的作用。现将超声分子成像综述如下。     

Electron‐Beam‐Related Studies of Halide Perovskites: Challenges and Opportunities

Electron beam microscopy and related characterization techniques play an important role in revealing the microstructural, morphological, physical, and chemical information of halide perovskites and their impact on associated optoelectronic devices. However, electron beam irradiation usually causes damage to these beam‐sensitive materials, negatively impacting their device performance, and complicating this interpretation. In this article, the electron microscopy and spectroscopy techniques are reviewed that are crucial for the understanding of the crystallization and microstructure of halide perovskites. In addition, special attention is paid to assessing and mitigating the electron beam‐induced damage caused by these techniques. Since the halide perovskites are fragile, a protocol involving delicate control of both electron beam dose and dose rate, coupled with careful data analysis, is key to enable the acquisition of reliable structural and compositional information such as atomic‐resolution images, chemical elemental mapping and electron diffraction patterns. Limiting the electron beam dose is critical parameter enabling the characterization of various halide perovskites. Novel methods to unveil the mechanisms of device operation, including charge carrier generation, diffusion, and extraction are presented in scanning electron microscopy studies combined with electron‐beam‐induced current and cathodoluminescence mapping. Future opportunities for electron‐beam‐related characterizations of halide perovskites are also discussed.     

Challenges and Opportunities in Cancer Metabolomics

Challenges in metabolomics for a given spectrum of disease are more or less comparable, ranging from the accurate measurement of metabolite abundance, compound annotation, identification of unknown constituents, and interpretation of untargeted and analysis of high throughput targeted metabolomics data leading to the identification of biomarkers. However, metabolomics approaches in cancer studies specifically suffer from several additional challenges and require robust ways to sample the cells and tissues in order to tackle the constantly evolving cancer landscape. These constraints include, but are not limited to, discriminating the signals from given cell types and those that are cancer specific, discerning signals that are systemic and confounded, cell culture‐based challenges associated with cell line identities and media standardizations, the need to look beyond Warburg effects, citrate cycle, lactate metabolism, and identifying and developing technologies to precisely and effectively sample and profile the heterogeneous tumor environment. This review article discusses some of the current and pertinent hurdles in cancer metabolomics studies. In addition, it addresses some of the most recent and exciting developments in metabolomics that may address some of these issues. The aim of this article is to update the oncometabolomics research community about the challenges and potential solutions to these issues.     

Plant Pathogens in Irrigation Water: Challenges and Opportunities

Plant pathogens in irrigation water were recognized early in the last century as a significant crop health issue. This issue has increased greatly in scope and degree of impact since that time and it will continue to be a problem as agriculture increasingly depends on the use of recycled water. Plant pathogens detected from water resources include 17 species of Phytophthora, 26 of Pythium, 27 genera of fungi, 8 species of bacteria, 10 viruses, and 13 species of plant parasitic nematodes. There is substantial evidence demonstrating that contaminated irrigation water is a primary, if not the sole, source of inoculum for Phytophthora diseases of numerous nursery, fruit, and vegetable crops. These findings pose great challenges and opportunities to the plant pathology community. A variety of water treatment methods are available but few have been assessed for agricultural purposes under commercial conditions. Investigations into their technical feasibility and economics are urgently needed. Aquatic ecology of plant pathogens is an emerging field of research that holds great promise for developing ecologically based water decontamination and other strategies of pathogen mitigation. Pathogen detection and monitoring as well as biological and economic thresholds are much-needed IPM tools and should be priorities of future research. Teaming with hydrologists, agricultural engineers, ecologists, geneticists, economists, statisticians, and farmers is essential to effectively attack such a complex issue of growing global importance. Research should proceed in conjunction with nutrient and pesticide management studies in a coordinated and comprehensive approach as they are interrelated components of water resource conservation and protection.     

Airborne Microalgae: Insights,Opportunities, and Challenges

Airborne dispersal of microalgae has largely been a blind spot in environmental biological studies because of their low concentration in the atmosphere and the technical limitations in investigating microalgae from air samples. Recent studies show that airborne microalgae can survive air transportation and interact with the environment, possibly influencing their deposition rates. This minireview presents a summary of these studies and traces the possible route, step by step, from established ecosystems to new habitats through air transportation over a variety of geographic scales. Emission, transportation, deposition, and adaptation to atmospheric stress are discussed, as well as the consequences of their dispersal on health and the environment and state-of-the-art techniques to detect and model airborne microalga dispersal. More-detailed studies on the microalga atmospheric cycle, including, for instance, ice nucleation activity and transport simulations, are crucial for improving our understanding of microalga ecology, identifying microalga interactions with the environment, and preventing unwanted contamination events or invasions.     

治疗性克隆研究的进展，机遇和挑战

治疗性克隆为很多疾病的治疗提供了新的策略 . 以韩国科学家最近在这一领域的突破性进展为基点,回顾近年来这一领域的主要进展,着重对“核移植重编程”以及“人胚胎干细胞的建系,扩增和分化”这两个治疗性克隆策略中的关键问题进行评述,并对治疗性克隆的发展前景和目前所遇到的挑战进行了展望 .     

Challenges and Opportunities for Customizing Polyhydroxyalkanoates

Polyhydroxyalkanoates (PHAs) as an alternative to synthetic plastics have been gaining increasing attention. Being natural in their origin, PHAs are completely biodegradable and eco-friendly. However, consistent efforts to exploit this biopolymer over the last few decades have not been able to pull PHAs out of their nascent stage, inspite of being the favorite of the commercial world. The major limitations are: (1) the high production cost, which is due to the high cost of the feed and (2) poor thermal and mechanical properties of polyhydroxybutyrate (PHB), the most commonly produced PHAs. PHAs have the physicochemical properties which are quite comparable to petroleum based plastics, but PHB being homopolymers are quite brittle, less elastic and have thermal properties which are not suitable for processing them into sturdy products. These properties, including melting point (T_m), glass transition temperature (T_g), elastic modulus, tensile strength, elongation etc. can be improved by varying the monomeric composition and molecular weight. These enhanced characteristics can be achieved by modifications in the types of substrates, feeding strategies, culture conditions and/or genetic manipulations.