Sichuan University

About: Sichuan University is a education organization based out in Chengdu, China. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Catalysis & Population. The organization has 107623 authors who have published 102844 publications receiving 1612131 citations. The organization is also known as: Sìchuān Dàxué.

Structured AutoEncoders for Subspace Clustering.

Abstract: Existing subspace clustering methods typically employ shallow models to estimate underlying subspaces of unlabeled data points and cluster them into corresponding groups. However, due to the limited representative capacity of the employed shallow models, those methods may fail in handling realistic data without the linear subspace structure. To address this issue, we propose a novel subspace clustering approach by introducing a new deep model-Structured AutoEncoder (StructAE). The StructAE learns a set of explicit transformations to progressively map input data points into nonlinear latent spaces while preserving the local and global subspace structure. In particular, to preserve local structure, the StructAE learns representations for each data point by minimizing reconstruction error w.r.t. itself. To preserve global structure, the StructAE incorporates a prior structured information by encouraging the learned representation to preserve specified reconstruction patterns over the entire data set. To the best of our knowledge, StructAE is one of first deep subspace clustering approaches. Extensive experiments show that the proposed StructAE significantly outperforms 15 state-of-the-art subspace clustering approaches in terms of five evaluation metrics.

Saliva: potential diagnostic value and transmission of 2019-nCoV.

Abstract: 2019-nCoV epidemic was firstly reported at late December of 2019 and has caused a global outbreak of COVID-19 now. Saliva, a biofluid largely generated from salivary glands in oral cavity, has been reported 2019-nCoV nucleic acid positive. Besides lungs, salivary glands and tongue are possibly another hosts of 2019-nCoV due to expression of ACE2. Close contact or short-range transmission of infectious saliva droplets is a primary mode for 2019-nCoV to disseminate as claimed by WHO, while long-distance saliva aerosol transmission is highly environment dependent within indoor space with aerosol-generating procedures such as dental practice. So far, no direct evidence has been found that 2019-nCoV is vital in air flow for long time. Therefore, to prevent formation of infectious saliva droplets, to thoroughly disinfect indoor air and to block acquisition of saliva droplets could slow down 2019-nCoV dissemination. This review summarizes diagnostic value of saliva for 2019-nCoV, possibly direct invasion into oral tissues, and close contact transmission of 2019-nCoV by saliva droplets, expecting to contribute to 2019-nCoV epidemic control.

Trienamines in asymmetric organocatalysis: Diels-Alder and tandem reactions.

Abstract: The discovery of a novel activation mode provided by organocatalysis is presented. It is demonstrated that the merger of optically active secondary amines and polyenals generates reactive trienamine intermediates, which readily participate in Diels-Alder reactions with different classes of dienophiles, hence, providing a facile entry to highly complex molecular frameworks with excellent stereocontrol. For the Diels-Alder reactions with 3-olefinic oxindoles, spirocyclic oxidoles are formed in high yields, and with enantioselectivities in the range of 94-98% ee. It is demonstrated, that some of these products can be transformed into the hexahydrofuro[2,3-b]indole fragment. The organocatalytic trienamine concept has been extended to also include Diels-Alder reactions of olefins substituted with cyanoacetates providing multifunctional cyclohexenes with three contiguous stereocenters in high yield and good stereocontrol. The novelty of this activation strategy lies within the perfect chirality relay over a distance of up to eight bonds. Moreover, we also present the first trienamine tandem reaction by combining trienamine catalysis with enamine activation. In addition to the experimental results, a detailed mechanistic survey is also provided including NMR spectroscopic studies and calculations of the reactive trienamine intermediates, rationalizing the origin of stereochemistry.

CB-Dock: a web server for cavity detection-guided protein-ligand blind docking.

Abstract: As the number of elucidated protein structures is rapidly increasing, the growing data call for methods to efficiently exploit the structural information for biological and pharmaceutical purposes. Given the three-dimensional (3D) structure of a protein and a ligand, predicting their binding sites and affinity are a key task for computer-aided drug discovery. To address this task, a variety of docking tools have been developed. Most of them focus on docking in the preset binding sites given by users. To automatically predict binding modes without information about binding sites, we developed a user-friendly blind docking web server, named CB-Dock, which predicts binding sites of a given protein and calculates the centers and sizes with a novel curvature-based cavity detection approach, and performs docking with a popular docking program, Autodock Vina. This method was carefully optimized and achieved ~70% success rate for the top-ranking poses whose root mean square deviation (RMSD) were within 2 A from the X-ray pose, which outperformed the state-of-the-art blind docking tools in our benchmark tests. CB-Dock offers an interactive 3D visualization of results, and is freely available at http://cao.labshare.cn/cb-dock/.