{"title":"Role of ACLY in the development of gastric cancer under hyperglycemic conditions","authors":"Keran Sun, Jingyuan Ning, Keqi Jia, Xiaoqing Fan, Hongru Li, Jize Ma, Meiqi Meng, Cuiqing Ma, Lin Wei","doi":"10.1002/qub2.36","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1002/qub2.36","url":null,"abstract":"To investigate the impact of hyperglycemia on the prognosis of patients with gastric cancer and identify key molecules associated with high glucose levels in gastric cancer development, RNA sequencing data and clinical features of gastric cancer patients were obtained from The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) database. High glucose‐related genes strongly associated with gastric cancer were identified using weighted gene co‐expression network and differential analyses. A gastric cancer prognosis signature was constructed based on these genes and patients were categorized into high‐ and low‐risk groups. The immune statuses of the two patient groups were compared. ATP citrate lyase (ACLY), a gene significantly related to the prognosis, was found to be upregulated upon high‐glucose stimulation. Immunohistochemistry and molecular analyses confirmed high ACLY expression in gastric cancer tissues and cells. Gene Set Enrichment Analysis (GSEA) revealed the involvement of ACLY in cell cycle and DNA replication processes. Inhibition of ACLY affected the proliferation and migration of gastric cancer cells induced by high glucose levels. These findings suggest that ACLY, as a high glucose‐related gene, plays a critical role in gastric cancer progression.","PeriodicalId":45660,"journal":{"name":"Quantitative Biology","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":3.1,"publicationDate":"2024-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140090106","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"生物学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Mahsa Babaei, S. Kashanian, Huang‐Teck Lee, Frances Harding
{"title":"Proteomics techniques in protein biomarker discovery","authors":"Mahsa Babaei, S. Kashanian, Huang‐Teck Lee, Frances Harding","doi":"10.1002/qub2.35","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1002/qub2.35","url":null,"abstract":"Protein biomarkers represent specific biological activities and processes, so they have had a critical role in cancer diagnosis and medical care for more than 50 years. With the recent improvement in proteomics technologies, thousands of protein biomarker candidates have been developed for diverse disease states. Studies have used different types of samples for proteomics diagnosis. Samples were pretreated with appropriate techniques to increase the selectivity and sensitivity of the downstream analysis and purified to remove the contaminants. The purified samples were analyzed by several principal proteomics techniques to identify the specific protein. In this study, recent improvements in protein biomarker discovery, verification, and validation are investigated. Furthermore, the advantages, and disadvantages of conventional techniques, are discussed. Studies have used mass spectroscopy (MS) as a critical technique in the identification and quantification of candidate biomarkers. Nevertheless, after protein biomarker discovery, verification and validation have been required to reduce the false‐positive rate where there have been higher number of samples. Multiple reaction monitoring (MRM), parallel reaction monitoring (PRM), and selected reaction monitoring (SRM), in combination with stable isotope‐labeled internal standards, have been examined as options for biomarker verification, and enzyme‐linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) for validation.","PeriodicalId":45660,"journal":{"name":"Quantitative Biology","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":3.1,"publicationDate":"2024-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140086627","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"生物学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Plasma proteome profiling reveals biomarkers of chemotherapy resistance in patients with advanced colorectal cancer","authors":"Jingxin Yang, Jin Chen, Luobin Zhang, Fangming Zhou, Xiaozhen Cui, Ruijun Tian, Ruilian Xu","doi":"10.1002/qub2.34","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1002/qub2.34","url":null,"abstract":"Colorectal cancer (CRC) is one of the most common cancers. Patients with advanced CRC can only rely on chemotherapy to improve outcomes. However, primary drug resistance frequently occurs and is difficult to predict. Changes in plasma protein composition have shown potential in clinical diagnosis. Thus, it is urgent to identify potential protein biomarkers for primary resistance to chemotherapy for patients with CRC. Automatic sample preparation and high‐throughput analysis were used to explore potential plasma protein biomarkers. Drug susceptibility testing of circulating tumor cells (CTCs) has been investigated, and the relationship between their values and protein expressions has been discussed. In addition, the differential proteins in different chemotherapy outcomes have been analyzed. Finally, the potential biomarkers have been detected via enzyme‐linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA). Plasma proteome of 60 CRC patients were profiled. The correlation between plasma protein levels and the results of drug susceptibility testing of CTCs was performed, and 85 proteins showed a significant positive or negative correlation with chemotherapy resistance. Forty‐four CRC patients were then divided into three groups according to their chemotherapy outcomes (objective response, stable disease, and progressive disease), and 37 differential proteins were found to be related to chemotherapy resistance. The overlapping proteins were further investigated in an additional group of 79 patients using ELISA. Protein levels of F5 and PROZ significantly increased in the progressive disease group compared to other outcome groups. Our study indicated that F5 and PROZ proteins could represent potential biomarkers of resistance to chemotherapy in advanced CRC patients.","PeriodicalId":45660,"journal":{"name":"Quantitative Biology","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":3.1,"publicationDate":"2024-02-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139837328","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"生物学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Plasma proteome profiling reveals biomarkers of chemotherapy resistance in patients with advanced colorectal cancer","authors":"Jingxin Yang, Jin Chen, Luobin Zhang, Fangming Zhou, Xiaozhen Cui, Ruijun Tian, Ruilian Xu","doi":"10.1002/qub2.34","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1002/qub2.34","url":null,"abstract":"Colorectal cancer (CRC) is one of the most common cancers. Patients with advanced CRC can only rely on chemotherapy to improve outcomes. However, primary drug resistance frequently occurs and is difficult to predict. Changes in plasma protein composition have shown potential in clinical diagnosis. Thus, it is urgent to identify potential protein biomarkers for primary resistance to chemotherapy for patients with CRC. Automatic sample preparation and high‐throughput analysis were used to explore potential plasma protein biomarkers. Drug susceptibility testing of circulating tumor cells (CTCs) has been investigated, and the relationship between their values and protein expressions has been discussed. In addition, the differential proteins in different chemotherapy outcomes have been analyzed. Finally, the potential biomarkers have been detected via enzyme‐linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA). Plasma proteome of 60 CRC patients were profiled. The correlation between plasma protein levels and the results of drug susceptibility testing of CTCs was performed, and 85 proteins showed a significant positive or negative correlation with chemotherapy resistance. Forty‐four CRC patients were then divided into three groups according to their chemotherapy outcomes (objective response, stable disease, and progressive disease), and 37 differential proteins were found to be related to chemotherapy resistance. The overlapping proteins were further investigated in an additional group of 79 patients using ELISA. Protein levels of F5 and PROZ significantly increased in the progressive disease group compared to other outcome groups. Our study indicated that F5 and PROZ proteins could represent potential biomarkers of resistance to chemotherapy in advanced CRC patients.","PeriodicalId":45660,"journal":{"name":"Quantitative Biology","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":3.1,"publicationDate":"2024-02-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139777352","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"生物学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Deep learning for drug‐drug interaction prediction: A comprehensive review","authors":"Xinyue Li, Zhankun Xiong, Wen Zhang, Shichao Liu","doi":"10.1002/qub2.32","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1002/qub2.32","url":null,"abstract":"The prediction of drug‐drug interactions (DDIs) is a crucial task for drug safety research, and identifying potential DDIs helps us to explore the mechanism behind combinatorial therapy. Traditional wet chemical experiments for DDI are cumbersome and time‐consuming, and are too small in scale, limiting the efficiency of DDI predictions. Therefore, it is particularly crucial to develop improved computational methods for detecting drug interactions. With the development of deep learning, several computational models based on deep learning have been proposed for DDI prediction. In this review, we summarized the high‐quality DDI prediction methods based on deep learning in recent years, and divided them into four categories: neural network‐based methods, graph neural network‐based methods, knowledge graph‐based methods, and multimodal‐based methods. Furthermore, we discuss the challenges of existing methods and future potential perspectives. This review reveals that deep learning can significantly improve DDI prediction performance compared to traditional machine learning. Deep learning models can scale to large‐scale datasets and accept multiple data types as input, thus making DDI predictions more efficient and accurate.","PeriodicalId":45660,"journal":{"name":"Quantitative Biology","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":3.1,"publicationDate":"2024-02-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139781655","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"生物学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Deep learning for drug‐drug interaction prediction: A comprehensive review","authors":"Xinyue Li, Zhankun Xiong, Wen Zhang, Shichao Liu","doi":"10.1002/qub2.32","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1002/qub2.32","url":null,"abstract":"The prediction of drug‐drug interactions (DDIs) is a crucial task for drug safety research, and identifying potential DDIs helps us to explore the mechanism behind combinatorial therapy. Traditional wet chemical experiments for DDI are cumbersome and time‐consuming, and are too small in scale, limiting the efficiency of DDI predictions. Therefore, it is particularly crucial to develop improved computational methods for detecting drug interactions. With the development of deep learning, several computational models based on deep learning have been proposed for DDI prediction. In this review, we summarized the high‐quality DDI prediction methods based on deep learning in recent years, and divided them into four categories: neural network‐based methods, graph neural network‐based methods, knowledge graph‐based methods, and multimodal‐based methods. Furthermore, we discuss the challenges of existing methods and future potential perspectives. This review reveals that deep learning can significantly improve DDI prediction performance compared to traditional machine learning. Deep learning models can scale to large‐scale datasets and accept multiple data types as input, thus making DDI predictions more efficient and accurate.","PeriodicalId":45660,"journal":{"name":"Quantitative Biology","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":3.1,"publicationDate":"2024-02-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139841411","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"生物学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"A comprehensive review of molecular optimization in artificial intelligence‐based drug discovery","authors":"Yuhang Xia, Yongkang Wang, Zhiwei Wang, Wen Zhang","doi":"10.1002/qub2.30","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1002/qub2.30","url":null,"abstract":"Drug discovery is aimed to design novel molecules with specific chemical properties for the treatment of targeting diseases. Generally, molecular optimization is one important step in drug discovery, which optimizes the physical and chemical properties of a molecule. Currently, artificial intelligence techniques have shown excellent success in drug discovery, which has emerged as a new strategy to address the challenges of drug design including molecular optimization, and drastically reduce the costs and time for drug discovery. We review the latest advances of molecular optimization in artificial intelligence‐based drug discovery, including data resources, molecular properties, optimization methodologies, and assessment criteria for molecular optimization. Specifically, we classify the optimization methodologies into molecular mapping‐based, molecular distribution matching‐based, and guided search‐based methods, respectively, and discuss the principles of these methods as well as their pros and cons. Moreover, we highlight the current challenges in molecular optimization and offer a variety of perspectives, including interpretability, multidimensional optimization, and model generalization, on potential new lines of research to pursue in future. This study provides a comprehensive review of molecular optimization in artificial intelligence‐based drug discovery, which points out the challenges as well as the new prospects. This review will guide researchers who are interested in artificial intelligence molecular optimization.","PeriodicalId":45660,"journal":{"name":"Quantitative Biology","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":3.1,"publicationDate":"2024-02-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139844458","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"生物学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"A comprehensive review of molecular optimization in artificial intelligence‐based drug discovery","authors":"Yuhang Xia, Yongkang Wang, Zhiwei Wang, Wen Zhang","doi":"10.1002/qub2.30","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1002/qub2.30","url":null,"abstract":"Drug discovery is aimed to design novel molecules with specific chemical properties for the treatment of targeting diseases. Generally, molecular optimization is one important step in drug discovery, which optimizes the physical and chemical properties of a molecule. Currently, artificial intelligence techniques have shown excellent success in drug discovery, which has emerged as a new strategy to address the challenges of drug design including molecular optimization, and drastically reduce the costs and time for drug discovery. We review the latest advances of molecular optimization in artificial intelligence‐based drug discovery, including data resources, molecular properties, optimization methodologies, and assessment criteria for molecular optimization. Specifically, we classify the optimization methodologies into molecular mapping‐based, molecular distribution matching‐based, and guided search‐based methods, respectively, and discuss the principles of these methods as well as their pros and cons. Moreover, we highlight the current challenges in molecular optimization and offer a variety of perspectives, including interpretability, multidimensional optimization, and model generalization, on potential new lines of research to pursue in future. This study provides a comprehensive review of molecular optimization in artificial intelligence‐based drug discovery, which points out the challenges as well as the new prospects. This review will guide researchers who are interested in artificial intelligence molecular optimization.","PeriodicalId":45660,"journal":{"name":"Quantitative Biology","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":3.1,"publicationDate":"2024-02-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139784698","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"生物学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Accurate cell type annotation for single‐cell chromatin accessibility data via contrastive learning and reference guidance","authors":"Siyu Li, Songming Tang, Yunchang Wang, Sijie Li, Yuhang Jia, Shengquan Chen","doi":"10.1002/qub2.33","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1002/qub2.33","url":null,"abstract":"Recent advances in single‐cell chromatin accessibility sequencing (scCAS) technologies have resulted in new insights into the characterization of epigenomic heterogeneity and have increased the need for automatic cell type annotation. However, existing automatic annotation methods for scCAS data fail to incorporate the reference data and neglect novel cell types, which only exist in a test set. Here, we propose RAINBOW, a reference‐guided automatic annotation method based on the contrastive learning framework, which is capable of effectively identifying novel cell types in a test set. By utilizing contrastive learning and incorporating reference data, RAINBOW can effectively characterize the heterogeneity of cell types, thereby facilitating more accurate annotation. With extensive experiments on multiple scCAS datasets, we show the advantages of RAINBOW over state‐of‐the‐art methods in known and novel cell type annotation. We also verify the effectiveness of incorporating reference data during the training process. In addition, we demonstrate the robustness of RAINBOW to data sparsity and number of cell types. Furthermore, RAINBOW provides superior performance in newly sequenced data and can reveal biological implication in downstream analyses. All the results demonstrate the superior performance of RAINBOW in cell type annotation for scCAS data. We anticipate that RAINBOW will offer essential guidance and great assistance in scCAS data analysis. The source codes are available at the GitHub website (BioX‐NKU/RAINBOW).","PeriodicalId":45660,"journal":{"name":"Quantitative Biology","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":3.1,"publicationDate":"2024-02-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139852551","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"生物学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Yazhen Song, Chenxi Feng, Difei Zhou, Zeng-Xin Ma, Lian He, Cong Zhang, Guihong Yu, Yan Zhao, Song Yang, Xinhui Xing
{"title":"Constructing efficient bacterial cell factories to enable one‐carbon utilization based on quantitative biology: A review","authors":"Yazhen Song, Chenxi Feng, Difei Zhou, Zeng-Xin Ma, Lian He, Cong Zhang, Guihong Yu, Yan Zhao, Song Yang, Xinhui Xing","doi":"10.1002/qub2.31","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1002/qub2.31","url":null,"abstract":"Developing methylotrophic cell factories that can efficiently catalyze organic one‐carbon (C1) feedstocks derived from electrocatalytic reduction of carbon dioxide into bio‐based chemicals and biofuels is of strategic significance for building a carbon‐neutral, sustainable economic and industrial system. With the rapid advancement of RNA sequencing technology and mass spectrometer analysis, researchers have used these quantitative microbiology methods extensively, especially isotope‐based metabolic flux analysis, to study the metabolic processes initiating from C1 feedstocks in natural C1‐utilizing bacteria and synthetic C1 bacteria. This paper reviews the use of advanced quantitative analysis in recent years to understand the metabolic network and basic principles in the metabolism of natural C1‐utilizing bacteria grown on methane, methanol, or formate. The acquired knowledge serves as a guide to rewire the central methylotrophic metabolism of natural C1‐utilizing bacteria to improve the carbon conversion efficiency, and to engineer non‐C1‐utilizing bacteria into synthetic strains that can use C1 feedstocks as the sole carbon and energy source. These progresses ultimately enhance the design and construction of highly efficient C1‐based cell factories to synthesize diverse high value‐added products. The integration of quantitative biology and synthetic biology will advance the iterative cycle of understand–design–build–testing–learning to enhance C1‐based biomanufacturing in the future.","PeriodicalId":45660,"journal":{"name":"Quantitative Biology","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":3.1,"publicationDate":"2024-02-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139851427","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"生物学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}