Publications by authors named "Ting-Fung Chan"

Electrospray ionization (ESI)-mass spectrometry (MS) is a key platform for analyzing post-translationally modified proteins. With continuous advances in MS instruments and data analysis methods, top-down analysis of intact proteoforms has become highly feasible. To accurately quantify proteoforms with varying post-translational modifications (PTMs), the influence of PTMs on the ESI-MS detection efficiency must be considered.

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Background: Induction of labor is commonly performed in pregnancies for clinical benefits, but 25% to 30% of inductions eventually fail and require cesarean delivery. So far, there is no biomarker for the prediction of successful vaginal birth after induction of labor, and clinical prediction remains unsatisfactory.

Objective: This study aimed at identifying circulating RNA transcripts of which the level changed before and after induction of labor and to assess their predictability of successful vaginal birth after induction.

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Structural variants (SVs) contribute to the genetic architecture of autism spectrum disorder (ASD), but their comprehensive characterization is limited by technological challenges in their detection. Optical genome mapping (OGM) offers a promising alternative, enabling the identification of large-scale SVs that might be overlooked by traditional sequencing methods. This study aimed to use OGM to identify SVs associated with ASD.

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Identifying crops with novel and climate resilience traits is imperative to ensure food security. Without a basic understanding of the genomes and genomic diversity of these crops they will remain underutilised or could even become lost. Kersting's groundnut [Macrotyloma geocarpum (Harms) Maréchal & Baudet] is one such crop, regarded as a useful, drought tolerant and sometimes valuable legume.

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MicroRNAs (miRNAs) are small non-coding RNAs that play crucial roles in post-transcriptional gene regulation. Poly(A) RNA polymerase D5 (PAPD5) catalyzes the addition of adenosine to the 3' end of miRNAs. In this study, we demonstrate that the Yin Yang 1 protein, a transcriptional repressor of PAPD5, is recruited to both RNA foci and protein aggregates, resulting in an upregulation of PAPD5 expression in Huntington's disease (HD).

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Background: Long non-coding RNAs (lncRNAs) play important roles in various biological processes, including stage development in plants. N-methyladenosine (mA) modification and polyadenylation are noteworthy regulatory processes that impact transcript functions by modulating their abundance. However, the specific landscapes of mA modification and polyadenylation on lncRNAs remain largely unexplored.

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Article Synopsis
  • The study introduces Anicom American Shorthair 1.0 (AnAms1.0), a new genome assembly for domestic cats, created from the more prevalent American Shorthair breed rather than the Abyssinian cat to better represent genetic diversity.
  • AnAms1.0 was developed using advanced genomics techniques and shows improved accuracy and contiguity compared to the previous reference genome (felCat9), revealing over 1,600 new protein-coding genes and significant structural variants.
  • The findings from AnAms1.0 will help in understanding genetic traits and diseases in domestic cats, with data available for public access to support further research in genetics and veterinary medicine.*
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Soybean (Glycine max) is an important crop for its nutritional value. Its wild relative, Glycine soja, provides a valuable genetic resource for improving soybean productivity. Root development and differentiation are essential for soybean plants to take up water and nutrients, store energy and anchor themselves.

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Rhizobia interact with leguminous plants in the soil to form nitrogen fixing nodules in which rhizobia and plant cells coexist. Although there are emerging studies on rhizobium-associated nitrogen fixation in cereals, the legume-rhizobium interaction is more well-studied and usually serves as the model to study rhizobium-mediated nitrogen fixation in plants. Rhizobia play a crucial role in the nitrogen cycle in many ecosystems.

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Gills and gut are the two primary osmoregulatory organs in fish. Recently, studies have expanded beyond the osmoregulatory mechanisms of these organs to explore the microbiota communities inhabiting them. It is now known that microbial communities in both organs shift in response to osmotic stress.

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Single-strand breaks are the major DNA damage in the genome and serve a crucial role in various biological processes. To reveal the significance of single-strand breaks, multiple sequencing-based single-strand break detection methods have been developed, which are costly and unfeasible for large-scale analysis. Hence, we propose SSBlazer, an explainable and scalable deep learning framework for single-strand break site prediction at the nucleotide level.

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Structural variations (SVs) are commonly found in cancer genomes. They can cause gene amplification, deletion and fusion, among other functional consequences. With an average read length of hundreds of kilobases, nano-channel-based optical DNA mapping is powerful in detecting large SVs.

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Article Synopsis
  • Breeding soybeans with increased protein while maintaining oil content is a significant challenge for breeders, with variations in traits being unstable across different environments.
  • Researchers identified a new stable genomic locus related to protein and oil traits, explaining a substantial amount of phenotypic variation (24.2% to 43.5%).
  • This study suggests further analysis of four candidate genes involved in seed development could lead to a better understanding of how to improve both protein and oil content in soybeans.
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Motivation: Recent rapid developments in spatial transcriptomic techniques at cellular resolution have gained increasing attention. However, the unique characteristics of large-scale cellular resolution spatial transcriptomic datasets, such as the limited number of transcripts captured per spot and the vast number of spots, pose significant challenges to current cell-type deconvolution methods.

Results: In this study, we introduce stVAE, a method based on the variational autoencoder framework to deconvolve the cell-type composition of cellular resolution spatial transcriptomic datasets.

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Prenatal exposure to perfluorooctanesulfonate (PFOS) increases fetus' metabolic risk; however, the investigation of the underlying mechanism is limited. In this study, pregnant mice in the gestational days (GD, 4.5-17.

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Complete, gapless telomere-to-telomere chromosome assemblies are a prerequisite for comprehensively investigating the architecture of complex regions, like centromeres or telomeres and removing uncertainties in the order, spacing, and orientation of genes. Using complementary genomics technologies and assembly algorithms, we developed highly contiguous, nearly gapless, genome assemblies for two economically important soybean [Glycine max (L.) Merr] cultivars (Williams 82 and Lee).

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Background: Lepidoptera (butterflies and moths) is one of the most geographically widespread insect orders in the world, and its species play important and diverse ecological and applied roles. Climate change is one of the biggest challenges to biodiversity this century, and lepidopterans are vulnerable to climate change. Temperature-dependent gene expression differences are of relevance under the ongoing climate crisis.

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Perfluorohexanesulfonic acid (PFHxS) is a short-chain perfluoroalkyl substance widely used to replace the banned perfluorooctanesulfonic acid (PFOS) in various industrial and household products. It can be found in the environment and human bodies; however, its potential toxicities are not well studied. Zebrafish have been extensively used as a model for studying toxicants, and currently, two studies have reported on the toxicity of PFHxS in zebrafish from different approaches.

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Introduction: Ischemic stroke accounts for 70-80% of all stroke cases, leading to over two million people dying every year. Poor diagnosis and late detection are the major causes of the high death and disability rate.

Methods: In the present study, we used the middle cerebral artery occlusion (MCAO) rat model and applied comparative transcriptomic analysis, followed by a systematic advanced bioinformatic analysis, including gene ontology enrichment analysis and Ingenuity Pathway Analysis (IPA).

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Hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) is the sixth most common cancer and third leading cause of cancer-related deaths worldwide. HCC is a multistep disease marked by various signaling alterations. A better understanding of the new molecular drivers of HCC could therefore provide an opportunity to develop effective diagnostic and therapeutic targets.

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Asthma is the chronic pulmonary inflammatory response that could lead to respiratory failure when allergic reactions exacerbate. It is featured by type 2 immunity with eosinophilic inflammation, mucus, and IgE production, and Th2 cytokine secretion upon repeated challenge of allergens. The symptom severity of asthma displays an apparent circadian rhythm with aggravated airway resistance in the early morning in patients.

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Objective: In this study we aim to unravel genetic determinants of coronary heart disease (CHD) in type 2 diabetes (T2D) and explore their applications.

Research Design And Methods: We performed a two-stage genome-wide association study for CHD in Chinese patients with T2D (3,596 case and 8,898 control subjects), followed by replications in European patients with T2D (764 case and 4,276 control subjects) and general populations (n = 51,442-547,261). Each identified variant was examined for its association with a wide range of phenotypes and its interactions with glycemic, blood pressure (BP), and lipid controls in incident cardiovascular diseases.

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Background: Cell free RNA (cfRNA) contains transcript fragments from multiple cell types, making it useful for cancer detection in clinical settings. However, the pathophysiological origins of cfRNAs in plasma from colorectal cancer (CRC) patients remain unclear.

Methods: To identify the tissue-specific contributions of cfRNAs transcriptomic profile, we used a published single-cell transcriptomics profile to deconvolute cell type abundance among paired plasma samples from CRC patients who underwent tumor-ablative surgery.

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