The great advances in deep learning techniques bring us a large number of sophisticated models that approach human-level performance in tasks such as image classification, speech recognition, and natural language processing. Despite its success, deep neural network (DNN) models are still vulnerable to adversarial attacks. Even with adding human-unrecognizable perturbations, the predictions of the ...

A new study has been reported by the laboratory of Associate Professor Li Xiajun at SLST, ShanghaiTech, to elucidate maintenance of DNA methylation in embryonic stem cells. This paper entitled “DNA methyltransferases are complementary in maintaining DNA methylation in embryonic stem cells” is published in iScience, a Cell press journal, on September 16, 2022. DNA methylation is th...

In recent years, the development and application of gene editing technology mediated by CRISPR/Cas9 (clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats-associated peptide 9) and its derivatives has attracted worldwide attention. A variety of gene editing tools relying on the homologous recombination (HR) pathway have been able to achieve precise DNA insertion or gene deletion, which not onl...

Recently, the research team led by SLST Associate Professor Sun Bo, in collaboration with the team led by Professor Liu Cong from the Interdisciplinary Research Center on Biology and Chemistry, CAS, have jointly published a research result in Angewandte Chemie International Edition, which reveals a novel interaction model between bloom syndrome helicase (BLM) and single-stranded DNA (ssDNA). ...

Chromosome segregation is critical to ensure that a complete copy of the parent's genetic information is passed on to each daughter cell. In most bacteria and plasmids, the correct segregation of chromosomes relies on the ParABS system, which consists of the ATPase protein ParA, the DNA-binding protein ParB and its target sequence parS. The formation of the ParB-DNA nucleoprotein complex ...

The sequence of the human genome is currently well-known, but the functions of the 20,000 protein-coding genes in over 500 types of cells remain unsolved, which severely hampers disease diagnosis and treatment. To systematically decipher the functions of all the genes in all the cells, one needs to inactivate (perturb) these genes and characterize the resulting cellular phenotypes, namely to map t...

As the global warming trend inevitably intensifies, and extreme high temperature become more and more frequent around the world, high temperatures become one of the most threatening factors in the challenge of global food security.  Temperature is a complex physical phenomenon. When plants face changes in environmental temperature, they must transduce this physical signal into a biologic...

Recently, the research team led by SLST Associate Professor Sun Bo published a research article in PNAS entitled “The convergence of head-on DNA unwinding forks induces helicase oligomerization and activity transition”, revealing a novel activity transition pathway of a DNA-repair-involved helicase.Helicases are ubiquitous molecular motors found in all organisms from phages t...

Tumor immunotherapy, enhancing the immune system to kill tumor cells and to exert clinical effects, is a revolutionary breakthrough in the field of tumor therapy. Tumor neoantigens are polypeptides with antigenicity resulting from DNA mutations and the key factors in determining the immunogenicity of tumor cells and the clinical efficacy of tumor immunotherapy. However, neoantigen immunogenicity p...

Professor Liu Ji-Long's group from SLST published a cover story entitled Combined inactivation of CTPS1 and ATR is synthetically lethal to MYC-overexpressing cancer cells in the March 15, 2022 issue of Cancer Research. This work demonstrates that selectively inhibiting CTPS1 combined with ATR inhibitor represents a promising strategy for the treatment of MYC-driven cancer in vitro and in ...

In the quest for understanding how the mammary gland epithelium forms its distinctive branching pattern, a team led by SLST researchers found that it uses a completely different system than what was previously believed In their new study, published on February 15 in Cell Reports, scientists from Lyu Pengfei’s group found that mammary gland epithelium lacking the polarity gene Lgl1 ...

On January 25, Associate Professor Guan Ji-Song’s research group of SLST published a research paper in Neuron entitled, “ASH1L haploinsufficiency results in autistic-like phenotypes in mice and links Eph receptor gene to autism spectrum disorder”. This study describes the role of Ash1l mutation in autism spectr...

The latest research by Associate Professor Lyu Pengfei’s group at SLST has found that the traditional tight junction component Occludin plays a crucial regulatory role in lipid droplet secretion, one of the fundamental cellular behaviors. On January 18th, 2022, the work from Lyu's lab was published online in PLOS Biology, in an article entitled “Occludin is a target of Src kinase and promote...

Mitochondria and peroxisomes are widely recognized as independent but functionally close-related organelles. Both are critical for the metabolism of lipids and reactive oxygen species. MARCH5 is a mitochondrion-associated ubiquitin ligase, with a function of regulating mitochondria fission and fusion, so as to maintain a dynamic balance of mitochondria. It also promotes mitophagy and regulates mit...