Volume 9, Issue 11, November 2022

Natural products are an essential aspect of global human health. Integration of contemporary technologies based on the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR) and the Quintuple Helix is needed to discover additional metabolites to be developed sustainably for the broad and unmet range of human healthcare needs.

Despite the success in malaria control, it remains a life-threatening infectious disease due mainly to the persistent emergence of drug resistance. Sharpened insight into the historical achievements and current trends in antimalarial drug discovery provides more hopes and advantages on natural products for the development of the next antimalarial treatment.

Focusing on the cycloadditions, which have been widely utilized in total synthesis, this perspective reviews the flourish research of pericyclase for cycloaddition and discusses existing challenges.

Polycarcin V, a light-dependent DNA intercalating agent, shows promising therapeutic effects for psoriasis, and its light-activatable chemical probe derivative enabled the identification of 311 DNA-binding proteins which is significant for new biology discovery.

The natural product (−)-anisomelic acid has been identified as an orally available antiviral agent against SARS-CoV-2.

So you thought that drugs came solely from the intellect of chemists and perhaps biologists. However as shown, Mother Nature is intimately involved in all these approved drugs.

Gastric cancer has two distinct subtypes: the diffuse (DGC) and the intestinal (IGC) subtypes. Morphologically, the former each consists of numerous scattered tiny tumors while the latter each has one or a few solid biomasses. The former tends to be more aggressive and takes place in younger patients than the latter. While these have long been documented, little is known about the underlying causes. Our hypothesis is that the level of sialic acid (SA) accumulation on the cancer cell surfaces is a key reason for the observed differences. Our transcriptomic data-based analyses provide evidence that (i) DGCs tend to deploy more SAs on cancer cell surfaces than IGCs; (ii) this gives rise to considerably stronger cell–cell electrostatic repulsion in DGCs due to the negative charge that each SA carries; and (iii) such repulsion drives stronger cell protrusion and metastasis. Similar observations as well as our transcriptomic data-based predictions hold for multiple other cancer types, namely breast, lung, prostate plus liver and thyroid cancers, each known to have diffuse-like vs. non-diffused subtypes as well as more aggressive behaviors like DGCs vs. IGCs. Hence, we speculate that the discovery presented here applies not only to gastric cancer but multiple and even potentially all cancer types having diffuse-like and non-diffused subtypes.

This paper demonstrates a novel lithography strategy based on resist nanokirigami, which can greatly improve the processing efficiency and reduce the proximity effect of electron beam lithography to define multiscale resist structures for multipurpose applications.

Resting on the novel non-Hermitian topology, we experimentally demonstrate state permutations in a non-Hermitian system follow non-Abelian, or “order-dependent” exchange rules.

This is the first study to characterize post-COVID-19 syndrome and identify risk factors for clinical and psychological sequelae of COVID-19 in two distinct cohorts of patients in China.

This paper reports the first in situ temperature and thermophysical properties analysis of the lunar far side regolith at the CE-4 landing site, performed by a customized thermal model, providing ground truth for future global thermophysical studies of the lunar surface.

A 300,000-year transient isotope-enabled simulation revealed the regional differences and causes of the orbital-scale precipitation isotope variations in arid Central Asia, monsoonal South Asia and East Asia.

A new-architecture space-frequency-polarization-division multiplexed wireless communication system is proposed using an anisotropic space-time-coding digital metasurface, which can improve the channel capacity and space utilization.

A new concept, aggregation value, is proposed to evaluate the real value of sample set, thus high-value sampling can be ensured which will greatly reduce the labelling effort for machine learning tasks.

A novel neuromorphic device based on a flexible MXene energy storage device was designed that can achieve a self-adaption neural network to avoid the loss of time and energy caused by recalculation.

This work presents a 3D morphable mesostructure capable of high-order shape morphing and high-frequency actuation with large deformation, which is applied for multiple functional devices.

A unique lithium fluoride interlayer woven by millimeter-level, single-crystal and serrated nanofibers enables uniform Li metal plating/stripping behaviors, effectively promoting the application of high-energy and high-safety Li metal batteries.

A nanocatalytic tumor-immunotherapeutic modality based on the bacteria-specific oxidative damage under magnetic hyperthermia (MH) reverses immunosuppression of tumor microenvironment and achieve excellent therapeutic efficacy in an orthotopic colorectal cancer model.

This review summarized the requirements, commercialized strategies and state-of-the-art studies of hemostatic materials for non-compressible hemorrhage control, providing a progress and future directions of this area.

One of the critical physics problems in magnetically confined fusion plasma, that the interaction between energetic particles and tearing modes, is reviewed based on theory, simulation and experiment.