No abstract

The deep population history of East Asia remains poorly understood due to a lack of ancient DNA data and sparse sampling of present-day people. We report genome-wide data from 191 individuals from Mongolia, northern China, Taiwan, the Amur River Basin and Japan dating to 6000 BCE – 1000 CE, many from contexts never previously analyzed with ancient DNA. We also report 383 present-day individuals from 46 groups mostly from the Tibetan Plateau and southern China. We document how 6000-3600 BCE people of Mongolia and the Amur River Basin were from populations that expanded over Northeast Asia, likely dispersing the ancestors of Mongolic and Tungusic languages. In a time transect of 89 Mongolians, we reveal how Yamnaya steppe pastoralist spread from the west by 3300-2900 BCE in association with the Afanasievo culture, although we also document a boy buried in an Afanasievo barrow with ancestry entirely from local Mongolian hunter-gatherers, representing a unique case of someone of entirely non-Yamnaya ancestry interred in this way. The second spread of Yamnaya-derived ancestry came via groups that harbored about a third of their ancestry from European farmers, which nearly completely displaced unmixed Yamnaya-related lineages in Mongolia in the second millennium BCE, but did not replace Afanasievo lineages in western China where Afanasievo ancestry persisted, plausibly acting as the source of the early-splitting Tocharian branch of Indo-European languages. Analyzing 20 Yellow River Basin farmers dating to ∼3000 BCE, we document a population that was a plausible vector for the spread of Sino-Tibetan languages both to the Tibetan Plateau and to the central plain where they mixed with southern agriculturalists to form the ancestors of Han Chinese. We show that the individuals in a time transect of 52 ancient Taiwan individuals spanning at least 1400 BCE to 600 CE were consistent with being nearly direct descendants of Yangtze Valley first farmers who likely spread Austronesian, Tai-Kadai and Austroasiatic languages across Southeast and South Asia and mixing with the people they encountered, contributing to a four-fold reduction of genetic differentiation during the emergence of complex societies. We finally report data from Jomon hunter-gatherers from Japan who harbored one of the earliest splitting branches of East Eurasian variation, and show an affinity among Jomon, Amur River Basin, ancient Taiwan, and Austronesian-speakers, as expected for ancestry if they all had contributions from a Late Pleistocene coastal route migration to East Asia.

Hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) is the third most frequent cause of tumor-related mortality and there are an estimated approximately 850,000 new cases annually. Most HCC patients are diagnosed at middle or advanced stage, losing the opportunity of surgery. The development of HCC is promoted by accumulated diverse genetic mutations, which confer selective growth advantages to tumor cells and are called “driver mutations”. The discovery of driver mutations provides a novel precision medicine strategy for late stage HCC, called targeted therapy. In this review, we summarized currently discovered driver mutations and corresponding signaling pathways, made an overview of identification methods of driver mutations and genes, and classified targeted drugs for HCC. The knowledge of mutational landscape deepen our understanding of carcinogenesis and promise future precision medicine for HCC patients.

Ba 3 Cu 14-δ Te 12 was prepared by directly reacting the elements in stoichiometric ratios at 800°C for 3 days, followed by slow cooling. Ba 3 Cu 14-δ Te 12 forms a new structure type, space group P2 1 /m, with lattice dimensions of a ) 11.909(2) Å, b ) 21.174(4) Å, c ) 11.983(2) Å, ) 117.071(4)°, and V ) 2690.6(8) Å 3 , for δ ) 0.35(2) (Z ) 4). The structure contains corner-, edge-, and face-sharing CuTe 4 tetrahedra interconnected with almost planar CuTe 3 units. These connections result in a three-dimensional Cu atom network with numerous Cu-Cu bonds. With two Te 2 2-dumbbells per formula unit, Ba 3 Cu 14-δ Te 12 is an electron-precise compound when δ ) 0, according to (Ba 2+ ) 3 (Cu + ) 14 (Te 2 2-) 2 (Te 2-) 8 . For δ > 0, the materials are degenerate semiconductors with moderate Seebeck coefficients and electrical conductivities, in accord with the electronic structure calculations, and exhibit extremely low thermal conductivity.