May the Force Be with You: Metabolism of Arginine and Pyrimidines

<正>"Why do arginine and pyrimidines have to be considered together?"This was the question I asked when I was invited by Barbara Zimmermann to attend the 23rd International Conference on Arginine and Pyrimidines(ICAP)three years ago.The meeting was held in the summer of 2012 at Bogota,Columbia,known as the"the Athens of South America".I am not alone in wanting to know more about the relationship between arginine and pyrimidines.Last summer,when I was organising the next ICAP meeting at Oxford(Aughey et al.,2014),one of my colleagues asked me,"Why such a weird name for a conference?"I am not sure if I had given her a satisfying answer and I was enthused to find out what the reasons may be.     

Preface

<正>I am pleased to see a special section of the Biosafety Journal devoted to Genetic Pest Management.This emerging field of science and technology is poised to make major contributions to safer approaches for pest management.As with any major emerging technology,the products of the technology can be developed in careful ways that are safe and useful,or they could     

发刊词

I am indeed very honored and delighted when Prof.Pingkai Ouyang asked me to write a preface article forthe new Chinese Journal of Bioprocess Engineering. Although,as a chemical engineer,I have been working in the petroleum and chemical industries for fortyyears,I did have the opportunity of conducting research and development work in the field of biotechnology forseveral years.My research was in both biochemical and biomedical areas.Because of this experience,I appre-ciate very much the importance of biotechnology and bioprocessing.Being familiar with this field,I feel the ex-citement and high anticipation about this new Journal.I wish to offer to Prof.Ouyang and his staff editors my     

Author's letter 1

正I am writing to apologize for our negligence and in our paper [Hong JIN, Bin LU and Jinzhong FU. 2018. Massive molecular parallel evolution of the HSP90AA1 gene between high-elevation anurans. Asian Herpetological Research9(3):195-200], in which we failed to include the second cultivation unit of the first author Hong JIN. Here we provide the missing information by Supplement and Correction below.Apologize again for my negligence!     

Ray Wu, as remembered by a former student

Some 35 years ago, I had the good fortune to be ac-cepted into Ray Wu’s lab as a graduate student. Ray was already well known for his pioneering studies in DNA se-quencing, and his lab was quietly humming with the ex-citement of the new approaches being developed for DNA labeling, sequencing and synthesis. Looking back, I am somewhat surprised that Ray accepted me into his lab-I was     

Regenerative medicine research in China: from basic research to clinical practice

<正>I am very happy to write editorial for this Special Issue of Stem Cells and Regenerative Medicine in China in Science China Life Sciences.As we all know,stem cells and regenerative medicine research is the frontiers not only in China,but also in the world.In recent decades,rapid research progressing,strong governmental support and recruitment of highly trained scientists from abroad together with domestic outstanding researchers and clinicians have made it possible     

Autism,an area that needs public attention and investment

<正>I would like to dedicate this special issue to children and adults who are affected by autism or related developmental disorders,as well as to their families and friends.I am indebted to the clinicians and care providers who have made tremendous effort in supporting these patients.They have inspired me to invest a significant amount of my energy to adventure into this area.I greatly appreciate all the contributing authors around the world whose hard work made this     

Reference ranges and age-related changes of peripheral blood lymphocyte subsets in Chinese healthy adults

This study was performed to build region-specific reference ranges of peripheral blood lymphocyte subsets for Chinese healthy adults from the young to the elderly and analyze the trends of changes in lymphocyte subsets for evaluating the impact of age on the values.151 healthy adults aged 19—86 were recruited based on the SENIEUR protocol.Three sets of reference ranges were finally built applicable for the healthy young(19—44 years),middle-aged(45—64 years) and elder adults(≥65).Comparisons in parameters am...     

Author's letter

正I am writing to apologize for our negligence in our paper[Shulin PAN,Ningxin DANG,Jishan WANG,Yitao ZHENG,Dingqi RAO and Jiatang LI.2013.Molecular Phylogeny Supports the Validity of Polypedates impresus Yang 2008.Asian Herpetol Res 4(2):124-133].There were some mistakes in the Table 1 and the related Figure 2.In Table 1,the localities of the samples with the Genbank numbers AF026350 and AF458141 were not from Hong Kong,China and AY880521 was not from Myanmar,which should be described as unknown data.The localities of the     

Novel SLA class I alleles of Chinese pig strains and their significance in xenotransplantation

To lay background for studying rejection mechanisms in xenotransplantation and developing the strate-gies for intervention, class I genes of swine leukocyte antigens (SLA) of three Chinese pig strains Bm, Gz and Yn were cloned and sequenced. The cDNA of the class I loci P1 and P14 were amplified by RT-PCR and subjected to insert into sequencing vectors. All six allelic sequences we examined, each two for one Chinese strain, are not identical to those reported, which allows these novel sequences receiving their ac-cession numbers AY102467- AY102472 from GenBank. This study further reveals that the homologies of MHC class I genes in their primary structures and the deduced amino acids between Chinese pigs (SLA) and human (HLA-A^*0201) are better than those between pigs and mice (H-2D^b/H-2K^b). The comparison also indicates that the amino acid residues critical for recognition by human KIRs are altered in the swine class I molecules. The amino acids responsible for binding human CD8 coreceptor are largely conserved although there are two critical residues substituted. A functional test indicated that the human T cells specific for the prokaryotically expressed SLA Plprotein could respond quite well in vitro to the class I-positive swine chon-drocytes and PBMCs in presence of human APCs. This implies that, due to the substitution of two critical residues, the inaccessibility of human CD8 coreceptor to swine class I molecule might be contributable to the indirect pathway that the human T cells have to use for recognizing the SLA class I xenogeneic antigens.