Vaginal microbiome: community characteristics and disease intervention / 生物工程学报

The application of high-throughput sequencing technologies has greatly enhanced our understanding to the human microbiome. The causal relations between human microbiome and diseases have become a critical issue to elucidate disease development and develop precision medicine. Recently, the study about vaginal microbiome (the microbial flora that inhabits the female vagina) has received wide interests. It has been shown that dysbiosis of vaginal microbiome was closely related to the development of genital tract diseases. This article summarizes the interaction between vaginal microbiome and disease and the treatment for the dysbiosis of vaginal microbiome. The culturomics of virginal microbiome, engineered probiotics and synthetic microbiome were also proposed.

Zebrafish as a model animal for the study of blood-brain barrier permeability by biomolecules / 药学学报

Blood-brain barrier (BBB) is the major obstacle for drug delivery into the central nervous system (CNS). However, there is no ideal model animal for the study of BBB permeability till now. Currently zebrafish (Danio rerio) has emerged as a powerful model organism for the study of vertebrate biology. In this study, the feasibility of using zebrafish as model animal was investigated for BBB permeability by comparing the results of administration of BBB-penetrating peptide and protein to mouse and zebrafish. The results showed that the BBBs of mouse and zebrafish were similar in molecular permeability. Additionally, zebrafish has advantageous features as a model animal, such as small size, fertile and easy to breed. Therefore, it is suggested that zebrafish may be a favored model for the study of BBB permeability.