Top 10 scientific achievements revealed

Activity aimed at motivating scientist, popularizing science

China on Monday announced the 10 major scientific and technological developments of 2016, including the world's first autism model of non-human primates and a new immune therapy for cancer, which is based on the regulation of cholesterol metabolism, the Xinhua News Agency reported Tuesday.

More than 2,000 experts and academicians, many from the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) and the Chinese Academy of Engineering, selected the 10 developments from a total of 278 research results that had been published between December 1, 2015 and November 30, 2016, Xinhua reported.

The selection has been organized by the High-Tech Research and Development Center under the Ministry of Science and Technology since 2005 with the aim to motivate Chinese scientific workers and promote science popularization, according to the report.

The Nature published a joint article by 26 Chinese researchers from the Shanghai Institute for Biological Science (SIBS) under the CAS on January 25, 2016, which revealed that they had developed the world's first non-human primate model that contains human autism genes.

The team attached human MECP2 genes to a harmless virus and injected it into the eggs of crab-eating macaque monkeys (Macaca fascicularis) in 2010. And since the first "autistic monkey" was born in 2011, all of its dozen descendants have inherited autism, showing repeat stereotyped behaviors that bore similarity to autism symptoms of humans.

This is the first published demonstration of a link between the autism-related gene MECP2 and animals' behaviors. Many autism symptoms are found in people who have extra copies of the gene (MECP2-duplication syndrome) and in those who have certain mutations in this gene, the Nature said.

"The risk of autism is 100 percent in males once the MECP2 gene duplicates," Qiu Zilong, a research fellow from the Institute of Neuroscience under the SIBS was quoted as saying by the Shanghai-based newspaper Jiefang Daily on January 26, 2016.

The researchers have started brain imaging studies on the monkeys and would use gene editing technology to treat them, in a bid to develop medicines for human autism, the Jiefang Daily said.

The Nature published another article by a research team from the Institute of the Biochemistry and Cell Biology under the SIBS on January 16, 2016, which claimed that the researchers had found "a new mechanism by which the antitumour response of mouse CD8+ T cells can be potentiated by modulating cholesterol metabolism."

The researchers found that by inhibiting cholesterol esterification in T cells by genetic ablation or pharmacological inhibition of a key cholesterol esterification enzyme5 ACAT1, effector function and proliferation of CD8+T cells would be enhanced, according the article.

The research opened a new field in tumor immunotherapy by demonstrating the vital effect of cell metabolism on anti-tumor response and finding a new drug target - ACAT1, Wang Hongyang, an academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering was quoted as saying by Xinhua on March 18, 2016.