Freeze-drying technique, commonly used for preparation of snacks from fruits and vegetables, is now utilized for generating therapeutic materials for cancer treatment. The freeze-drying process could maintain the color, flavor, and nutritional content of food by removing water from solid to gas phase directly under reduced pressure and low temperature. It is being harnessed to preserve active components and structures of human tissues as drug depots.Freeze-dried fruits and vegetables.Led by Prof...

[Editor’s Note: In this Dialogue@ZJU, we feature Prof. WANG Jian'an, Academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Director of the National Key Laboratory of Vascular lmplantation Devices, Secretary of the Party Committee and Director of the Heart Center, Second Affiliated Hospital, Zhejiang University School of Medicine, and Vice Dean of Zhejiang University School of Medicine. From early inspirations rooted in family health challenges to pioneering the Hangzhou Solution for heart disease...

On June 20, the laboratory of CHEN Xin and TANG Jianjun at the College of Life Science,Zhejiang University,published an article entitled “Fish mediate surface soil methane oxidation in the agriculture heritage rice–fish system” in the journal Ecosystems. This study reveals how fish affect surface soil methane oxidation through foraging activities that cause trophic cascading and drive nitrogen recycling in the paddy ecosystem.Methane (CH4) emission is affected by the rates ...

According to the National Bureau of Statistics, approximately one in every five people in China is over 60 years old. This demographic shift towards an ageing population is posing great challenges on agriculture sector. A new study has quantified the impact of ageing through a set of data science research, providing the first explanation of the role of ageing in agriculture and solutions to address the issue. The results were published in Nature on February 22. How does rural ageing th...

ZJU’s Peasant, Rural and Agriculture Association (PRAA) was founded in April 2003. It is the first advanced university student association in Zhejiang Province with the theme of agriculture, and rural issues. The Association actively guides college students to understand the rural area, pay attention to agriculture, and care for farmers. It encourages students to widely carry out social practice, social research and theoretical research related these issues. Through various activities, PRA...

According to the WHO’s ‘Estimates of the Global Burden of Foodborne Diseases’ report in 2015, approximately 600 million people (almost one in 10) worldwide fall ill from eating contaminated food annually; about 420,000 of these cases result in death each year. Moreover, the number of cases of illness caused by eating contaminated food continues to grow. As a result of globalized supply chains, food crosses numerous jurisdictions across many different interventions and stages, including p...

A plant-based dietary pattern is usually defined as a diet rich in plant-based foods and low level of animal-based foods, and has received accumulating attention for its potential health and environmental benefits. However, not all plant-based foods are necessarily beneficial to health, and most prior studies focused only on the western population, while there is limited evidence for the East Asian population  with a tradition of plant-based diet.On March 7, 2022, the research team led by D...

How does a cell develop into various types of tissues and organs with the same set of genome? Epigenetic modification patterns play a vital role in these processing. DNA methylation, a type of stably inheritable epigenetic modification, which is ubiquitous and conserved in both animals and plants, are essential for gene regulation, transposon silencing and gene imprinting. However, how DNA methylation patterns are regulated has remained obscure in the field of epigenetics.Recently, Assistant Pro...

Long-term hematopoietic stem cells (LT-HSCs) generate and maintain lifelong blood cell production through their self-renewal and multi-lineage capacity. In the steady state, this rare population of adult stem cells is quiescent, resulting in decreased reactive oxygen species (ROS) and thereby preserving genome integrity. Driving the quiescent HSCs into cycling due to physiological stress such as infection or chronic blood loss leads to a rapid increase in the levels of oxidative DNA damage, incl...

The real-time cumulative number of confirmed cases of COVID-19 throughout the world has exceeded 330 million with more than 5.5 million deaths, according to the statistics from Johns Hopkins University [1]. The global outbreak of the epidemic caused by SARS-CoV-2 has been lasting for more than two years, hitting hard nations all around the world. Under the current circumstance of the uncertainty in drug efficacy, vaccination is considered to be the most promising approach to contain the vir...