chung-chih Lin

National Yang Ming University | NYMU · School of Life Sciences

Diabetes is a risk factor for Alzheimer’s disease (AD), a chronic neurodegenerative disease. We and others have shown prediabetes, including hyperglycemia and obesity induced by high fat and high sucrose diets, is associated with exacerbated amyloid beta (Aβ) accumulation and cognitive impairment in AD transgenic mice. However, whether hyperglycemi...

The Golgi apparatus and membrane tubules derived from this organelle play essential roles in membrane trafficking in eukaryotic cells. High-resolution live cell imaging is one highly suitable method for studying the molecular mechanisms of dynamics of organelles during membrane trafficking events. Due to the complex morphological changes and dynami...

PurposeIntracellular organelles play an essential role in regulating the biochemistry of various processes and events in eukaryotic cells. Understanding and quantifying their morphological dynamics should allow for their deeper analysis. However, the development of organelle and membrane tracking algorithms is challenging, especially in the case of...

Background & aims: PreS mutants of HBV have been reported to be associated with hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC). We conducted a longitudinal study of the role of HBV preS mutations on development of HCC, particularly in chronic hepatitis B (CHB) patients having low HBV DNA or ALT levels, and investigated effects of secretion-defective preS2 deletio...

The Golgi apparatus plays a key role in the secretory pathway of eukaryotic cells. The exact physiological roles and the molecular mechanism of regulation of dynamics of such membranous structures are not fully understood. According to time-lapse imaging data, Golgi-derived membrane structures are highly dynamic and vary in number and shape, i.e. g...

Mitochondrial fission occurs frequently in plant cells, but its biological significance is poorly understood because mutants specifically impaired in mitochondrial fission do not show obvious defects in vegetative growth. Here, we revealed that the production of viable pollen was reduced in mutants lacking one of the three main proteins involved in...

This paper has been accepted to be published in Plant Physiology. This is the first paper to quantify 3D mitochondrial morphology numerically and automatically.

α-Synuclein is associated with Parkinson's disease, and is mainly localized in presynaptic terminals and regulates exocytosis, but its physiological roles remain controversial. Here, we studied the effects of soluble and aggregated α-synuclein on exocytosis, and explored the molecular mechanism by which α-synuclein interacts with regulatory protein...

Background: According to Compendium of Materia Medica, Gastrodia elata (GE) Blume as a top grade and frequently prescribed herbal medicine has been used in treating dizziness, headaches, and epilepsy, indicating a neuroprotective effect. Because GE is capable of suppressing a hyperactive liver and thus calming endogenous wind, and because Huntingto...

CISD2, CDGSH Iron Sulfur Domain 2, is a gene associated with Wolfram Syndrome. Lack of CISD2 results in premature aging. Such defects can cause skin thinning and activate mitophagy and mitochondrial disorder. However, the effects of CISD2 knockout on mitochondrial dynamics of skin tissues are unclear because lack of 3D mitochondrial morphological a...

Mitochondria has been elaborately studied in few past decades but its dynamics such as fusion-fission events and mitophagy still poses serious challenges for high-resolution live cell imaging. To investigate such highly three-dimensional (3D) dynamics, we developed multi-color lattice light-sheet microscopy with excellent optical sectioning, sub-se...

Mitochondria has been elaborately studied in few past decades but its dynamics such as fusion-fission events and mitophagy still poses serious challenges for high-resolution live cell imaging. To investigate such highly three-dimensional (3D) dynamics, we developed multi-color lattice light-sheet microscopy with excellent optical sectioning, sub-se...

Glucose transporter 10 (GLUT10) is a member of the GLUT family of membrane transporters, and mutations in this gene cause arterial tortuosity syndrome (ATS). However, the physiological role and regulation of GLUT10 in arteries remains unclear. To further understand its physiological roles in major arteries, we examined the regulatory mechanisms of...

Intrinsic apoptosis eliminates cells with damaged DNA and cells with dysregulated expression of oncogene. PGAM5, a member of the phosphoglycerate mutase family, has two splicing variants: PGAM5L (the long form) and PGAM5S (the short form). It has been well established that PGAM5 is at the convergent point of multiple necrosis pathways. However, the...

Areca nut (AN) is a popular carcinogen used by about 0.6-1.2 billion people worldwide. Although AN contains apoptosis-inducing ingredients, we previously demonstrated that both AN extract (ANE) and its 30-100 kDa fraction (ANE 30-100K) predominantly induce autophagic cell death in both normal and malignant cells. In this study, we further explored...

Mitochondria play an important role in producing energy of cell, aging and cell death. Previous investigations suggest that mitochondrial dysfunctions are associated with neurodegenerative, and the peripheral blood cells of those patients have validation of mitochondrial morphology. This study presents an analysis system of automated 3D mitochondri...

Targeted inhibition of multidrug ABCG2 transporter is believed to improve cancer therapeutics. However, the consequences of ABCG2 inhibition have not been systematically evaluated since ABCG2 is expressed in several organs including the liver. Here, we demonstrate that ABCG2-deficient hepatocytes have increased amounts of fragmental mitochondria ac...

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Exocytosis is an important process of membrane traffic and functions such as secretion of proteins, turnover of plasma membrane and presenting receptors to plasmas membrane. However, there are few tools to observe the dynamic of vesicles and detect exocytosis automatically. PTrackII was developed to track the secretory granules with different size...

Mitochondria are highly motile organelles that constantly undergo fission and fusion. Impairment of mitochondrial dynamics is associated with mitochondrial dysfunction and is frequently linked to the pathogenesis of neurodegenerative diseases and cancer. We have previously shown that biallelic inactivation of the suppressor of cytokine signaling 6...

Localization of proteins ties closely with the protein functions-the disorder of protein delivering can cause misfunction of the protein and genetic diseases. The analysis of micrographs can help to understand the distribution of proteins in the cell. ER protein's images analysis leads the researches to know that the same protein localization means...

Author Summary Mitochondria are “cellular power plants” that synthesize adenosine triphosphate (ATP) from degradation of nutrients, providing chemical energy for cellular activities. In addition, mitochondria are involved in a range of other cellular processes, such as signaling, cell differentiation, cell death, cell cycle and cell growth. Dysfunc...

In this manuscript, we describe a biocompatible organic electrode system, comprising poly(3,4-ethylenedioxythiophene) (PEDOT) microelectrode arrays on indium tin oxide (ITO) glass, that can be used to regulate the neuron type, location, polarity, and outgrown length of neuron-like cells (PC-12). We fabricated a PEDOT microelectrode array with four...

Mitochondria are highly motile organelles that constantly undergo fission and fusion. Impairment of mitochondrial dynamics is associated with mitochondrial dysfunction and frequently linked to the pathogenesis of neurodegenerative diseases and cancer. We have previously shown that loss-of-function of suppressor of cytokine signaling 6 (SOCS6) is a...

Rab3A is a small G-protein of the Rab family that is involved in the late steps of exocytosis. Here, we studied the role of Rab3A and its relationship with Munc13-1 and Munc18-1 during vesicle priming. Phorbol 12-myristate 13-acetate (PMA) is known to enhance the percentage of fusion-competent vesicles and this is mediated by protein kinase C (PKC)...

Fluorescent cell micrographs contain inhomogeneous contrast levels due to fluorescence intensity variations and the existence of out-of-focus objects. A novel image enhancement method based on adaptive local region sizes is proposed, which can correctly highlight salient objects from changing background intensity. The local region size for each pix...

High-throughput image-based assay technologies can rapidly produce a large number of cell images for drug screening, but data analysis is still a major bottleneck that limits their utility. Quantifying a wide variety of morphological differences observed in cell images under different drug influences is still a challenging task because the result c...

Automated cell phenotype image classification is related to the problem of determining locations of protein expression within living cells. Localization of proteins in cells is directly related to their functions and it is crucial for several applications ranging from early diagnosis of a disease to monitoring of therapeutic effectiveness of drugs....

Membrane trafficking is a very important physiological process involved in protein transport, endocytosis, and exocytosis. The functions of vesicles are strongly correlated with various spatial dynamic properties of vesicles, including their types of movements and morphology. Several methods are used to quantify such dynamic properties, but most of...

As rapid acquisition of large collections of fluorescence microscopy cell images can be automated, large-scale subcellular localizations of GFP-tagged fusion proteins can be practically accomplished. Semi-supervised learning has the potential of using a large set of unlabeled images for the recognition of subcellular organelle patterns, but the per...

The high sensitivity and spatial resolution enabled by two-photon excitation fluorescence lifetime imaging microscopy/fluorescence resonance energy transfer (2PE-FLIM/FRET) provide an effective approach that reveals protein-protein interactions in a single cell during stimulated exocytosis. Enhanced green fluorescence protein (EGFP)-labeled synapto...

Systemic analysis of subcellular protein localization (location proteomics) provides clues for understanding gene functions and physiological condition of the cells. However, recognition of cell images of subcellular structures highly depends on experience and becomes the rate-limiting step when classifying subcellular protein localization. Several...

The chloroplast genome of an albino mutant isolated from tissue culture of the bamboo Bambusa edulis Munro was examined to identify aberrations. A number of the chloroplast genes encoding ATP synthases, photosystem II subunits, NADH dehydrogenase, and ribosomal proteins had been deleted, at least partially, in the albino mutant. Comparison of the t...

A xylem mutant (vse) was isolated from a Bambusa edulis (Odashima) Keng plantlet following vegetative micropropagation and subculture for 7 consecutive years and induced to proliferate in medium supplemented with 0.1 mg·L-1 (0.5 μM) thidiazuron (TDZ) and to develop roots in medium supplemented with 5 mg·L-1 (26.9 μM) α-naphthaleneacetic acid (NAA)....

Mitochondria are now known to function physiologically not only in the production of ATP as the major cellular energy source, but also in the regulation of intracellular signaling, in, for example, stress-induced apoptosis and buffering of cytosolic calcium. It should be noted, when interpreting mitochondrial studies in situ, that mitochondria with...

After 6 years of subculture in the presence of 0.1 mg/l thidiazuron (TDZ), a somaclonal variation of Bambusa edulis, vse had lost its capability to form stamens. The inflorescences were used to establish stamen-less inflorescence proliferation. In addition to the absence of stamens, the vse inflorescence had a longer palea and fewer trichromes on t...

In vitro grown inflorescences of Bambusa edulis were used to investigate the process of vegetative shoot growth in detail. The findings revealed that auxins and ACC could be significant growth regulators in this process. Overall, auxins [NAA, indolebutyric acid (IBA), and 2,4-dichlorophenoxyacetic acid (2,4-D)] induced inflorescences to grow vegeta...

The goal of this study is to examine whether there is a difference in the regulation of Ca2+ between mitochondria near the cell surface and mitochondria in the cytosol. Total internal reflection fluorescence and epifluorescence microscopy were used to monitor changes in the mitochondrial Ca2+ ([Ca2+]mt) between the mitochondria near the plasma memb...

Current research on somatic embryogenesis of bamboo uses reproductive tissue as explants. However, it was hard to obtain the explant. Shoots of a local accession (3–4 m high) were used for multiple shoot production. In order to obtain embryogenic callus, nodal and internodal tissues from in vitro plantlets were placed on Murashige and Skoog (MS) me...

Most perennial plants must pass through a long juvenile phase of vegetative development before they are capable of flowering. We have developed a method specifying inflorescence proliferation to bypass juvenility and maintain the adult phase. Bamboo ( Bambusa edulis) inflorescences were amplified by incubation in Murashige and Skoog medium suppleme...

Bamboo shoots could be induced to flower in vitro, but there is very little information on the effect of growth components on flowering. In this study, multiple shoots grown from in vitro, spikelet-derived, somatic embryos of Bambusa edulis were used for in vitro flowering. Multiple shoots flowered on Murashige and Skoog medium (MS) with 0.5 μM thi...

Secretory proteins exit the ER in transport vesicles that fuse to form vesicular tubular clusters (VTCs) which move along microtubule tracks to the Golgi apparatus. Using the well-characterized in vitro approach to study the properties of Golgi membranes, we determined whether the Golgi enzyme NAGT I is transported to ER/Golgi intermediates. Secret...

Upon addition of GTPS to in vitro budding reactions, COP I vesicles form but retain their coat, making them easy to isolate and analyze. We have developed an in vitro budding assay that reconstitutes the formation of COP I-derived vesicles under conditions where GTP hydrolysis can occur. Once formed, vesicles are uncoated and appear functional as t...

Secretory proteins enter the Golgi apparatus when transport vesicles fuse with the cis-side and exit in transport vesicles budding from the trans-side. Resident Golgi enzymes that have been transported in the cis-to-trans direction with the secretory flow must be recycled constantly by retrograde transport in the opposite direction. In this study,...

The rapid development of biotechnology in recent years has contributed greatly to the advancement of plant sciences. Its application can be categorized into two fields, i.e., tissue culture and molecular biology. This paper summarizes the application of biotechnology to crop production with representing examples. A. Tissue culture 1. The combinatio...

In this paper our aim is to study how an ensemble of classifiers can improve the performance of a machine learning technique for cell phenotype image classification. We want to point out some of the advantages that an ensemble of classifiers permits to obtain respect a stand-alone method. Finally, the preliminary results on the 2D-HeLa dataset, obt...