Outstanding Articles
ICG clearance test based on photoacoustic imaging for assessment of human liver function reserve: An initial clinical study

Liver function reserve (LFR) plays an extensive and important role in patients with liver disease. Indocyanine green (ICG) clearance test is the standard diagnostic approach for LFR evaluation which was performed by spectrophotometry or pulse dye densitometry (PDD). Spectrophotometry is the gold standard, it's invasive and not real-time. PDD is non-invasive, but accuracy of PDD is controversial. Taken spectrophotometry as the reference standard, this study investigated the accuracy of photoacoustic imaging (PAI) method for LFR assessment and compared to PDD in healthy volunteers. The results demonstrated a strong correlation between PAI method and spectrophotometry (r = 0.9649, p < 0.0001). No significant difference was shown in ICG clearance between PAI and spectrophotometry method (rate constant k1 vs. k2, 0.001158 +−0.00042 vs. 0.001491 +- 0.00045, p = 0.0727; half-life t1 vs. t2, 601.2 s vs. 474.4 s, p = 0.1450). These results indicated that PAI may be valuable as a noninvasive, accurate diagnostic tool for LFR assessment in human.

2023-05-31

Photoacoustics

West China Hospital, Sichuan University

Structural basis of BAM-mediated outer membrane β-barrel protein assembly

The outer membrane structure is common in Gram-negative bacteria, mitochondria and chloroplasts, and contains outer membrane β-barrel proteins (OMPs) that are essential interchange portals of materials1,2,3. All known OMPs share the antiparallel β-strand topology4, implicating a common evolutionary origin and conserved folding mechanism. Models have been proposed for bacterial β-barrel assembly machinery (BAM) to initiate OMP folding5,6; however, mechanisms by which BAM proceeds to complete OMP assembly remain unclear. Here we report intermediate structures of BAM assembling an OMP substrate, EspP, demonstrating sequential conformational dynamics of BAM during the late stages of OMP assembly, which is further supported by molecular dynamics simulations. Mutagenic in vitro and in vivo assembly assays reveal functional residues of BamA and EspP for barrel hybridization, closure and release. Our work provides novel insights into the common mechanism of OMP assembly.

2023-04-30

Nature

West China Hospital, Sichuan University

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A U.S. Academician Joins MedComm as an Editor-in-Chief

2021-03-26

Open the phone and scan

Now MedComm is privileged to have Prof. Günter P. Wagner, a U.S. Academician as an Editor-in-Chief.


Günter P. Wagner

A member of the American National Academy of Sciences

A member of the American Association for the Advancement of Science

A member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the Austrian Academy of Sciences

A MacArthur Fellow

Prof. Günter P. Wagner is a pioneer of the field of evolutionary developmental biology. His research interest is the evolution of gene regulation, evolutionary medicine, obstetrics, and reproductive sciences. 

Prof. Günter P. Wagner spent many years on research and teaching at the Max Planck Institutes for Biophysical Chemistry and Developmental Biology (Germany), and Department of Zoology, U. Vienna (Austria). Currently, he is a professor of the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Yale University, and a professor of the Department of Obstetrics, Gynecology and Reproductive Sciences at Yale Medical School. 

Prof. Günter P. Wagner has published around 200 academic papers in internationally renowned journals, including Nature, Nature Genetics, Genome Research, Nature Review, NEJM, Science and PNAS. He used to serve as the editor-in-chief of the Journal of Experimental Zoology and a member of editorial board of several international medical journals. Prof. Günter P. Wagner received the MacArthur Fellowship (also known as the "Genius Grant”) and is a member of the American National Academy of Sciences, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the Austrian Academy of Sciences.

About MedComm


MedComm is an English professional journal of biomedicine published by Wiley—the biggest publisher in the world (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/26882663, click "Read more" on the bottom of the text). Its editors-in-chief include Prof. James Henderson Naismith of University of Oxford (a fellow of the Royal Society (UK) and the Royal Society of Edinburgh) , Prof. Günter P. Wagner of Yale University (a member of the American National Academy of Sciences, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences), and Prof. Wei Yuquan of the State Key Laboratory of Biotherapy at West China Hospital, Sichuan University (an academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences), and its associate editors and editorial board members comprise eminent scientists from more than 10 countries in the world. Academician Wu Yuquan, one of the editors-in-chief, also founded the Signal Transduction and Targeted Therapy (with an Impact Factor of 13.493 in 2019) in 2016.

MedComm is a peer-reviewed, online open access journal that timely publishes the basic research and clinical research works in biomedicine, and strives to become a high-quality academic journal with the greatest international influence in the field of biomedicine. The journal publishes reviews, perspectives, research articles, letters to editors, research highlights and so on, and the Article Publication Charge is waived for accepted manuscripts from 2020-2022. In addition, the format of manuscripts is not limited at the time of submission and will be revised according to the requirements of the journal when it is officially accepted for publication.

MedComm cordially invites all science researchers, doctors and postgraduates in the field of biomedicine to submit manuscripts.