Peer-Reviewed Journal Articles
Wenting Luo, Emmanuel Gonzalez, Ariyan Zarei, Sebastian Calleja,
Bruno Rozzi, Jeffrey Demieville, Haiquan Li, Maria-Jose Truco, Dean Lavelle,
Richard Michelmore, John M. Dyer, Matthew A. Jenks, Duke Pauli
Abstract
Cuticular waxes of plants impart tolerance to many forms of environmental stress and help shed dangerous human pathogens on edible plant parts. Although the chemical composition of waxes on a wide variety of important crops has been described, a detailed wax compositional analysis has yet to be reported for lettuce (Lactuca sativa L.), one of the most widely consumed vegetables. We present herein the leaf wax content and composition of 12 genetically diverse lettuce cultivars sampled across five time points during their vegetative growth phase in the field. Mean total leaf wax amounts across all cultivars varied little over 28 days of vegetative growth, except for a notable decrease in total waxes following a major precipitation event, presumably due to wax degradation from wind and rain. All lettuce cultivars were found to contain a unique wax composition highly enriched in 22- and 24-carbon length 1-alcohols (docosanol and tetracosanol, respectively). In our report, the dominance of these shorter chain length 1-alcohols as wax constituents represents a relatively rare phenotype in plants. The ecological significance of these dominant and relatively short 1-alcohols is still unknown. Although waxes have been a target for improvement of various crops, no such work has been reported for lettuce. This study lays the groundwork for future research that aims to integrate cuticular wax characteristics of field grown plants into the larger context of lettuce breeding and cultivar development.
Wenting Luo, Edwin Baldwin, Anna Yi Jiang, Shujuan Li, Bo Yang, and Haiquan Li
Abstract
To examine the association between housing types and COVID-19 infection (or mental health) during the early stages of the pandemic by using the large-scale individual-level All of Us Research Program COVID-19 Participant Experience (COPE) survey data. We hypothesise that housing types with a shared component are associated with elevated COVID-19 infection and subsequent mental health conditions.
A retrospective case–control study.
Secondary analysis of online surveys conducted in the USA.
62 664 participant responses to COPE from May to July 2020.
Primary outcome measure is the self-reported COVID-19 status, and the secondary outcome measures are anxiety or stress. Both measures were applied for matched cases and controls of the same race, sex, age group and survey version.
A multiple logistic regression analysis revealed that housing types with a shared component are significantly associated with COVID-19 infection (OR=1.19, 95% CI 1.1 to 1.3; p=2×10−4), anxiety (OR=1.26, 95% CI 1.1 to 1.4; p=1.1×10−6) and stress (OR=1.29, 95% CI 1.2 to 1.4; p=4.3×10−10) as compared with free-standing houses, after adjusting for confounding factors. Further, frequent optional shopping or outing trips, another indicator of the built environment, are also associated with COVID-19 infection (OR=1.36, 95% CI 1.1 to 1.8; p=0.02), but not associated with elevated mental health conditions. Confounding factors are controlled in the analysis such as ethnicity, age, social distancing behaviour and house occupancy.
Our study demonstrates that houses with a shared component tend to have an increased risk of COVID-19 transmission, which consequently leads to high levels of anxiety and stress for their dwellers. The study also suggests the necessity to improve the quality of the built environment such as residential housing and its surroundings through planning, design and management, ensuring a more resilient society that can cope with future pandemics.
Keywords: COVID-19, mental health, health informatics
Haiquan Li, Edwin Baldwin, Xiang Zhang, Colleen Kenost, Wenting Luo, Elizabeth A Calhoun, Lingling An, Charles L Bennett, and Yves A Lussier
Abstract
Prior research has reported an increased risk of fatality for patients with cancer, but most studies investigated the risk by comparing cancer to non-cancer patients among COVID-19 infections, where cancer might have contributed to the increased risk. This study is to understand COVID-19’s imposed HR of fatality while controlling for covariates, such as age, sex, metastasis status and cancer type.
We conducted survival analyses of 4606 cancer patients with COVID-19 test results from 16 March to 11 October 2020 in UK Biobank and estimated the overall HR of fatality with and without COVID-19 infection. We also examined the HRs of 13 specific cancer types with at least 100 patients using a stratified analysis.
COVID-19 resulted in an overall HR of 7.76 (95% CI 5.78 to 10.40, p<10−10) by following 4606 patients with cancer for 21 days after the tests. The HR varied among cancer type, with over a 10-fold increase in fatality rate (false discovery rate ≤0.02) for melanoma, haematological malignancies, uterine cancer and kidney cancer. Although COVID-19 imposed a higher risk for localised versus distant metastasis cancers, those of distant metastases yielded higher overall fatality rates due to their multiplicative effects.
The results confirmed prior reports for the increased risk of fatality for patients with COVID-19 plus hematological malignancies and demonstrated similar findings of COVID-19 on melanoma, uterine, and kidney cancers.
The results highlight the heightened risk that COVID-19 imposes on localised and haematological cancer patients and the necessity to vaccinate uninfected patients with cancer promptly, particularly for the cancer types most influenced by COVID-19. Results also suggest the importance of timely care for patients with localised cancer, whether they are infected by COVID-19 or not.
Edwin Baldwin, Jiali Han, Wenting Luo, Jin Zhou, Lingling An, Jian Liu, Hao Helen Zhang, Haiquan Li
Abstract
Recent years have witnessed the tendency of measuring a biological sample on multiple omics scales for a comprehensive understanding of how biological activities on varying levels are perturbed by genetic variants, environments, and their interactions. This new trend raises substantial challenges to data integration and fusion, of which the latter is a specific type of integration that applies a uniform method in a scalable manner, to solve biological problems which the multi-omics measurements target. Fusion-based analysis has advanced rapidly in the past decade, thanks to application drivers and theoretical breakthroughs in mathematics, statistics, and computer science. We will briefly address these methods from methodological and mathematical perspectives and categorize them into three types of approaches: data fusion (a narrowed definition as compared to the general data fusion concept), model fusion, and mixed fusion. We will demonstrate at least one typical example in each specific category to exemplify the characteristics, principles, and applications of the methods in general, as well as discuss the gaps and potential issues for future studies.
Other publications:
1. Xu, L.D., Zhang, F., Chen, C., Peng, L., Luo,W. T., Chen, R., ... Huang, Y.W. (2022). Revisiting theMongolian GerbilModel for Hepatitis E Virus by Reverse Genetics. Microbiology Spectrum, 10(2), e02193-21.
2. Qin, P., Luo, W. T., Su, Q., Zhao, P., Zhang, Y.,Wang, B., Yang, Y. L., Huang, Y.W. (2021). The porcine deltacoronavirus accessory protein NS6 is expressed in vivo and incorporated into virions. Virology, 556, 1-8.
3. Xu, L.D., Zhang, F., Peng, L., Luo,W. T., Chen, C., Xu, P., Huang, Y.W. (2020). Stable expression of a hepatitis E virus (HEV) RNA replicon in two mammalian cell lines to assess mechanism of innate immunity and antiviral response. Frontiers in Microbiology, 11.
4. Qin, P., Du, E. Z., Luo, W. T., Yang, Y. L., Zhang, Y. Q., Wang, B., Huang, Y. W. (2019). Characteristics of
the life cycle of porcine deltacoronavirus (PDCoV) in vitro: replication kinetics, cellular ultrastructure and virion morphology, and evidence of inducing autophagy. Viruses, 11(5), 455.
5. Wang, B., Liu, Y., Ji, C. M., Yang, Y. L., Liang, Q. Z., Zhao, P., Xu. L. D, Lei. X. M, Luo, W. T., Huang, Y.
W. (2018). Porcine deltacoronavirus engages the transmissible gastroenteritis virus functional receptor porcine aminopeptidase N for infectious cellular entry. Journal of Virology, 92(12).