Biochemistry
Change to Guide for Authors – Link from your article to relevant databases
DATABASE LINKING – change in format at Elsevier to align with BioDBcore
Many journals encourage authors to connect their articles to external databases. By doing this, the authors’ work is enriched with precise referencing and gives readers one-click access to relevant databases that help to build a better understanding of the described research. Databases will benefit from the extra traffic generated by those links.
Authors are encouraged to include unique identifiers or accession numbers linking to information on genes, proteins, diseases, structures or datasets deposited in public databases and repositories. The ISB and Biosharing have been instrumental in moving towards a uniform standard for such links through launching the BioDBcore initiative.
Elsevier has recently introduced a new uniform and standardized format that is now fully aligned with ISB and BioDBcore standards. Entities should be identified in the following way: database abbreviation: data identifier, bearing in mind that an error in a letter or number can result in a dead link in the article. Visit the list of databases and examples currently widely used.
Authors are encouraged to follow the standard. Databases wishing to establish better links between the literature and their database could support publishers by drawing more attention to the opportunities presented in html text and participate in collaborations to mutual benefit.
Journal of Proteomics welcomes new Editor Ole N. Jensen to cover the area of protein mass spectrometry
The team of handling editors is further expanded, to deal with the growth in submissions and ensure rapid and hassle-free turnaround of manuscripts. The journal welcomes Ole Nørregaard Jensen, one of the world's leading experts in this field and are pleased he will be joining with immediate effect.
Ole N. Jensen is currently Professor, Department of Biochemistry & Molecular Biology, University of Southern Denmark. He obtained his Msc degree from the Univ. Southern Denmark in 1990 and a PhD-degree in biochemistry and biophysics from Oregon State University, USA, in 1994. After 2 years of postdoctoral research at the EMBL in Heidelberg, Germany, he returned to Denmark in 1997 as an assistant professor. Since 2004, he is a professor of protein mass spectrometry. The main interest of Ole N. Jensen is quantitative mass spectrometry technology for determination of post-translational modifications involved in cellular signaling and recognition events, from the characterization of plasma membrane proteins and cell surface receptors to epigenetic mechanisms for gene regulation and maintenance of chromatin structure and function. He is also interested in the fundamentals of mass spectrometry techniques for characterization of proteins and peptides, including advanced ion dissociation techniques, multistage mass spectrometry and ion mobility spectrometry. Ole N. Jensen has coauthored more than 217 research articles and presented lectures at many international meetings. Ole is an active member of several EuPA and HUPO educational committees and has great experience in organizing proteomics education/training courses at the University of Southern Denmark, including mass spectrometry training courses for HUPO, EuPA and EMBO.
JPROT welcomes new Editor in Proteomics for Biotechnological Applications
The Journal of Proteomics has further updated the 
list of editors with a short biography of our new editor for the field Proteomics for Biotechnological Applications:
Professor Gabriel Padrón studied Chemistry at Havana University and received the Ph.D degree from Humboldt University, Berlin in 1975. He is a Senior Researcher at the Center for Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology (CIGB) in Havana and Professor at the Faculties of Chemistry and Biology of Havana University and the Faculty of Chemical Engineering of the Technical University of Havana. He has been working for 30 years in protein and peptide characterization by mass spectrometry and his main research interest is method development and elucidation of drug action mechanisms by proteomics tools.
He was Sub-director for Biomedical Research of the CIGB during ten years. Visiting research fellow and visiting professor at: Institute for Bioorganic Chemistry "Shemiakin", Moscow; Max Planck Institute for Biochemistry, Martinsried; LURE, South Paris University, France; Institute for Protein Research, Osaka University; European Molecular Biology Laboratory, EMBL, Heidelberg, Faculty of Pharmacy, Universidad Complutense, Madrid; Department of Biological Sciences, University of Warwick; Institute for Biomedical Research, Universidad de Barcelona; Technical University "Federico Santa María", Valparaiso; Universidad Nacional de Colombia, Bogotá. Member of the Cuban Academy of Sciences and member of the Expert Board for Pharmaceutical Research of the Cuban Ministry of Science, Technology and Environment.
He has been organizer and professor of several international courses on proteomics. He is currently an executive editor of the Journal of Proteomics.
Special Issue: Cell–cell communication in development and disease
Edited by Lars-Oliver Klotz and Klaudia Giehl
This Special Issue covers novel developments in the biology of junctional complexes and signaling pathways contributing to the regulation of cell-cell communication and the implications of those findings for disease.
Special Issue: RNA in all its forms
Edited by Carine Tisné
In this special issue of Biochimie named "RNA in all its forms", we have chosen topics that enable the reader to have a brief overview of all the potentialities and functions contained in the RNA molecule. This issue begins with five articles related particularly to the "RNA world". Indeed, the discovery of ribozymes, RNAs with catalytic activity, revealed some extraordinary properties of this molecule, and corroborated the idea that RNA was the first informative polymer. Read the issue online.
Journal of Proteomics welcomes new additional Bioinformatics Editor
Pavel Pevzner holds the Ronald R. Taylor Chair in Computer Science at UCSD. He received his PhD in 1988 from Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology. Pevzner is the author of the textbooks "Computational Molecular Biology: An Algorithmic Approach" (2000) and "Introduction to Bioinformatics Algorithms" (2004). He is an executive editor of the "Journal of Computational Biology," and co-founder of the International Conference on Research in Computational Biology (RECOMB). In 2006 he was named HHMI Professor. In 2010 he was elected to the Board of Directors of the Human Proteome Organization. He directs the Interdisciplinary Graduate Program in Bioinformatics and Systems Biology and the Center for Algorithmic and Systems Biology at UCSD. Since 2008 he directs the NIH Center for Computational Mass Spectrometry at UCSD. In 2010 he was elected Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM).
Otto Warburg Medal for Alexander Varshavsky
Biochemist and geneticist Alexander Varshavsky (California Institute of Technology, USA), who was born in Moscow and has lived in the USA since 1977, has been awarded the Otto Warburg Medal of the German Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology (GBM). That medal is considered to be the highest German award for biochemists and molecular biologists. Check the BBA journals website for more details.
Allosteric Regulation. Special Issue Edited by Gregory Grant
This volume will hopefully provide the reader with an appreciation of how far we have come since the term "allosteric" was first used in 1961 to describe the regulation of enzyme activity by conformational modulation. Also, this volume will likely provide a sense of how far we still have to go to truly understand the process at the molecular level in all of its facets.
BBA General Subjects Poster award at SASBMB/FASBMB meeting in South Africa
At a well attended South African Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology conference organized by Drs. Theresa Coetzer, Marco Weinberg, Alexio Capovilla and coworkers from the University of the Witwatersrand, three poster prizes were awarded in a grand finale - the first prize being the Elsevier/BBA General Subjects prize, with two second and third prizes being awarded by the organizers themselves. The BBA General Subjects prize went to Reyna Deeya Ballim, Department of Human Biology, Faculty of Health Sciences, University of Cape Town, South Africa, for the following poster "The Ulnar-Mammary Syndrome Gene, TBX3, is a Direct Target of the Retinoic Acid Signalling Pathway, which Regulates its Expression During Mouse Limb Development" by Reyna Deeya Ballim, Cathy Mendelsohn, Virginia E. Papaioannou and Sharon Prince. Congratulations!
New Executive Editor BBA Proteins and Proteomics
The Publisher gratefully acknowledges the excellent role and support provided by Paul Cook as Executive Editor of BBA Proteins and Proteomics for so many years. We are happy to announce we found an enthusiastic successor, Irene Lee, who started January 1st in her new role. Her research interests include enzymology of proteases, kinases, ATPases, amine oxidases and polymerases.
Irene Lee received her undergraduate degrees in Chemistry and Biology at the University of Toledo, Ohio. She then conducted her graduate work with Stephen J Benkovic at the Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA on screening and developing antibodies that catalyze amide bond hydrolysis; she received her Ph.D. in 1995. She was then employed as a postdoctoral research associate in the Benkovic lab to study the mechanism of a cell-cycle regulated DNA methyltransferase (CcrM) that has been implicated by genetic studies to be an endogenous substrate of Lon protease. She joined the Department of Chemistry at Case Western Reserve University in 1998 and is currently an Associate Professor in the department. Her research interests entail enzymology of proteases, kinases, ATPases, amine oxidases and polymerases. Additionally structure-activity studies of synthetic molecules that are designed as modulators or activity probes of the aforementioned enzymes also constitute a major research focus. It is anticipated that information generated from these studies will be used to advance our understanding of enzyme catalysis in the context of their physiological functions in cells.
LIPID MAPS and Elsevier Launch Lipid Structures App on SciVerse Applications
Click here to see the recent press release. The application can be downloaded by all ScienceDirect subscribers – see the app web site and click on Add application buttons.
This application identifies lipid names or synonyms in an online article and provides the user with supporting information on that particular lipid in a popup which displays the structure and other key information for that molecule as represented on the LIPID MAPS™ website. Information includes common and systematic names, formula, exact mass, InChIKey, classification hierarchy and links to other public databases. A panel in the side-bar also provides a convenient listing of lipid molecules in the article along with snippits from the text where the structure occurs.
The app developer, Eoin Fahy, and colleagues recently wrote an informative article on Lipid Maps in a BBA special titled " Lipidomics and Imaging Mass Spectrometry ".
BBRC Mini-reviews on Autophagy
Two recently published mini-reviews in BBRC, our ultra-rapid publication journal, focus on the important topic of autophagy and cell death mechanisms in relation to therapeutics:
- Cell death pathology: Cross-talk with autophagy and its clinical implications
Ivano Amelio, Gerry Melino, Richard A. Knight
Highlights
- autophagy is a physiological self-digestive process of intracellular components
- a regulator of autophagy initiation, Beclin 1, can be inhibited by the apoptotic regulator Bcl-2
- some data have led to pharmacological trials of autophagy inhibitors in anti-cancer therapy
- Concanavalin A: A potential anti-neoplastic agent targeting apoptosis, autophagy and anti-angiogenesis for cancer therapeutics
Wen-wen Li, Jia-ying Yu, Huai-long Xu, Jin-ku Ba
Highlights
- ConA induces cancer cell death targeting apoptosis and autophagy
- ConA inhibits cancer cell angiogenesis
- ConA is utilized in pre-clinical and clinical trials.
For more details on BBRC editors visit the journal website
Bacteria are 'cool'
This year, the universities of Amsterdam, VU Amsterdam and UvA University, join forces to participate as a team in the iGEM (international Genetically Engineered Machine) competition. Seven motivated students of both Amsterdam Universities get the unique opportunity to participate in the synthetic biology competition organized by MIT.
IGEM is an international synthetic biology competition for undergraduate students. The participating students should be as creative to design a feasible project, in which the project is performed during the summer. The designed "BioBricks" - pieces of DNA with a particular function - in the project will enrich the open source database of iGEM. The project of the Amsterdam iGEM team concerns developing IcE. Coli, which are E. coli bacteria that are more resistant to low temperatures. Potential applications of IcE coli are the production of biofuels and cleaning oil spills.
Progress in Lipid Research editor presents a PLR Young Speaker Award at 52nd International Conference on the Bioscience of Lipids
Progress in Lipid Research editor and ICBL President Guenther Daum (right on photo; left George Carman) recently presented a PLR Young Speaker Award, to Malgorzata Gutkowska-Stronkowska from Warsaw whose excellent contribution was selected from the many outstanding contributions submitted for the conference.
The special issue of Chemistry and Physics of Lipids
Editor-in-chief Richard Epand
Vol 164 supplement 1 containing abstracts from the 52nd International Conference on the Bioscience of Lipids is now available online
BBA Lipids Lectureship – awarded to Jean Vance
Elsevier and the Molecular and Cell Biology of Lipids section of BBA sponsored the travel and registration costs of an invited lecturer to the 2011 Gordon Research Conference on the Molecular and Cellular Biology of Lipids held in Waterville Valley, NH USA from July 17-22. The lecturer this year was Jean Vance, Ph.D., Professor of Medicine at the University of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada. Dr. Vance was honored for her contributions to phospholipid and cholesterol metabolism in mammalian cells. The title of her presentation was "Cholesterol trafficking in the brain and in Niemann-Pick C disease". Pictured with Dr. Vance (center) are William Dowhan, Ph.D., outgoing executive editor, and Suzanne Jackowski, Ph.D., incoming executive editor of the Journal. Rudi Zechner, Ph.D. is the continuing executive editor. Judy Storch, Ph.D., Professor of Nutritional Sciences at Rutgers University, was the organizing chair of this year's meeting.
In vitro fertilization: Four decades of reflections and promises
This article outlines the development and progression of IVF from its infancy to the refined and broadly utilized technology offered to patients today. The authors describe the evolution of the field and the current state of IVF, including its current technological and social challenges. The article is a tribute to Robert Edwards who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine for his exceptional accomplishments in this specific and rewarding field of modern medicine. Published in BBA General Subjects – publishing papers of general significance.
BBA sets new records – impressive increase in Impact Factors
BBA would like thank all authors, reviewers, and (guest) editors who contributed to the increase in impact factors of all BBA's sections publishing original research, resulting in a record high average score of 5.125 for the nine sections.
For the full list of our Biochemistry titles, click to this informative overview.
ISMB / BioDBCore workshop on Unifying Bio-Resource Descriptors, Vienna, July 18th, 2:30 PM
Organisers: Dawn Field, NERC, NEBC, UK; Pascale Gaudet, Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics, Switzerland; Susanna-Assunta Sansone, University of Oxford, UK.
The workshop will bring together developers, curators, journal editors and researchers to discuss the growing number of (closely related) efforts emerging around catalogues of tools, databases, related data and publications. The focus of the workshop is a straw-man uniform system for describing bio-resources, in particular, indicating in a consistent manner which community-defined standards, such as minimal information checklists, terminologies and exchange formats, they implement. Such a uniform system will i) assist the research and bioinformatics communities to locate and access information distributed in bio-resources, and ii) inform journal editors and funding agencies implementing data preservation, management and sharing policies, when they recommend or require that certain standards are met and that data are deposited in public databases. If you are going to ECCB/ISMB in Vienna, please join us: http://www.iscb.org/ismbeccb2011-program/workshops#w4.Authoritative Review (25 printed pages)
Ether lipids - by Carlos D. Magnusson and Gudmundur G. Haraldsson
Highlights
- This review article provides a comprehensive and up to date review on the naturally occurring 1-O-alkyl-sn-glycerol ether lipids and their methoxylated congeners, 1-O-(2′-methoxyalkyl)-sn-glycerols.
- These are biologically active compounds, ubiquitously found in nature as diacyl glyceryl ether lipids and phosphoether lipids.
- The occurrence and distribution of these compounds in nature are extensively reviewed, their chemical structure and molecular variety, their biosynthesis and chemical synthesis and, finally, their various biological effects are described and discussed.
Ref. Chemistry and Physics of Lipids Volume 164, Issue 5, July 2011, Pages 315-340 (Editor-in-Chief Richard Epand)
Editor Helmut Meyer presents BBA Young Investigator Award to Juli-Maria Burkhart
During the recent 18. Arbeitstagung "Mikromethoden in der Proteinchemie" the BBA Young Investigator Award was presented to Juli-Maria Burkhart from the ISAS-Institute in Dortmund. All in all, the organizers presented 6 prizes which were sponsored from participating companies. 16 young scientist applied for one of these prizes and 8 of them were chosen for an 12 min oral presentation. The auditorium voted then who gave the best presentation with the best performance. All of the young scientist were quite nervous but likewise very excellent when they presented their work and can be congratulated on their performance.
The 19. Arbeitstagung "Mikromethoden in der Proteinchemie" will be held in Bochum in 2012, organized by Prof. Dr. Helmut E. Meyer, Executive Editor BBA Proteins and Proteomics, and Direktor Medizinisches Proteom-Center, Bochum
BBA Proteins and Proteomics – for submissions in proteomics and protein bioinformatics, use our e-submission site.
New organization in plant proteomics – join now!
INPPO is a global plant proteomics organization to properly organize, preserve and disseminate collected information on plant proteomics.
The broad goals of INPPO are to i) achieve the establishment of complete proteomes from plants, ii) exploit them to address critical biological questions (such as plant, seed and crop improvement), iii) achieve better basic understanding of plant systems in interaction with their biotic and abiotic environments, and iv) develop applications aimed toward sustainable agriculture, environmental biotechnologies, healthier and safer plants, new plant materials, nutraceuticals and more. Ten initiatives of INPPO are outlined in a recent paper in PROTEOMICS along with how to address them in multiple phases. As our vision is global, we sincerely hope the scientific communities around the world will come together to support and join INPPO. To join, fill in your details.
BBRC welcomes new Bioinformatics Editor
BBRC – the most rapid journal in the Life Sciences – is pleased to welcome Professor Anna Tramontano from Italy as an Editor handling Bioinformatics papers. A quick glance at her curriculum shows we could not have wished for a more suitable candidate. The journal looks forward to many more high quality submissions in the areas of computational biology and bioinformatics that merit rapid publication. To submit your next paper to Anna Tramontano, please visit our submission website.
Prof. Anna TRAMONTANO (IT) - Current position: Chair Professor of Biochemistry in the "Sapienza" University in Rome.
Anna Tramontano was trained as a physicist but she soon became fascinated by the complexity of biology and by the promises of computational biology. After working at the Biocomputing Programme of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory in Heidelberg, Germany, she moved back to Italy to work in the Merck Research Laboratories. Later she returned to the academic world as a Chair Professor of Biochemistry in the "Sapienza" University in Rome where she continues to pursue her scientific interests on protein structure prediction and analysis. She is a member of the European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO) and of the Scientific Council of Institute Pasteur - Fondazione Cenci Bolognetti. She is a member of the Scientific Advisory Boards of several prestigious Institutions including the Institute Pasteur - Fondazione Cenci Bolognetti, the European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI), the MPI for Molecular Genetics in Berlin, the Swiss Institute for Bioinformatics, the Centro Nacional de Biotecnología in Madrid and the International Institute of Molecular and Cell Biology in Warsaw. Anna is currently a Member of the Scientific Council of the European Research Council (ERC). She has been vice President of the International Society for Computational Biology (about 1500 members) and part of the steering committee of the European networks, BioSapiens and Elixir. She has received, among others, the Tartufari Prize of the Accademia dei Lincei, the KAUST Global Research Partnership award, the special Government Prize for Natural Sciences and the Marotta Prize of the National Academy of Science.
Highlighted article on MALDI protein profiling in Journal of Proteomics
The first decade of MALDI protein profiling: A lesson in translational biomarker research (review). MALDI protein profiling has identified several important challenges in omics-based biomarker research. First, research into the analytical performance of a novel omics-platform of potential diagnostic impact must be carried out in a critical manner and according to common guidelines. Evaluation studies should be performed at an early time and preferably before massive advancement into explorative biomarker research. In particular, MALDI profiling underscores the need for an adequate understanding of the causal relationship between molecular abundance and the quantitative measure in multivariate biomarker research. Secondly, MALDI profiling has raised awareness of the significant risk of false-discovery in biomarker research due to several confounding factors, including sample processing and unspecific host-response to disease. Here, the experience from MALDI profiling supports that a central challenge in unbiased molecular profiling is to pinpoint the aberrations of clinical interest among potentially massive unspecific changes that can accompany disease. The lessons from the first decade of MALDI protein profiling are relevant for future efforts in advancing omics-based biomarker research beyond the laboratory setting and into clinical verification.
2nd Sir Michael Berridge Lecture – by Katsuhiko Mikoshiba
The Sir Michael Berrigde lectureship was inaugurated in 2008 at the 10th Symposium of the ECS Society in Leuven, Belgium, to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the seminal paper of Berridge and his colleagues published in Nature to demonstrate the IP3-dependent calcium release from a nonmitochondrial intracellular store which later turned out to be the endoplasmic reticulum. The first lecture was delivered by Chakashi Toyoshima in Leuven who solved the structural principles of the activation cycle of the Ca2+ pump of the sarcoplasmic reticulum. Katsuhiko Mikoshiba (RIKEN Brain Research Institute, Hirosawa, Japan) who discovered the IP3 receptor gave the second Berridge lecture to close the symposium in Warsaw. He summarized the breath-taking amount of data he and his Lab collected over the years on the structure-function relationship of the IP3 receptor and its role in cell function and disease, only a few of them can be mentioned here.
We are looking forward to the 3rd ECS workshop 2011 in Seix, France, followed by the 12th ECS Calcium Meeting which is going to be organized by Marc Moreau and his colleagues in 2nd week of September 2012 in Toulouse, France.
A special issue containing papers from this conference can now be found online
BBA Molecular Cell Research Volume 1813, Issue 5 (May 2011)
11th European Symposium on Calcium
Edited by J. Haiech, C.W. Heizmann and J. Krebs
BBRC introducing Graphical Abstracts
BBRC – the number 1 journal in the field of Biophysics in the EigenFactor ™ score ranking, number of articles published and total cites – is now introducing optional Graphical Abstracts to help the journal stay in its premier spot and optimally serve authors and readers.
A Graphical abstract is optional and should summarize the contents of the paper in a concise, pictorial form designed to capture the attention of a wide readership online. Authors must provide images that clearly represent the work described in the paper. Graphical Abstracts should be submitted as a separate file in the online submission system. Image size: Please provide an image with a minimum of 531 × 1328 pixels (h × w) or proportionally more. Preferred file types: TIFF, EPS, PDF or MS Office files. See www.elsevier.com/graphicalabstracts for examples.
BBA Proteins and Proteomics adds strength in Proteomics field with 3 new board members
BBA Proteins and Proteomics is pleased to announce the appointment of three additional Editorial board members to strengthen expertise in this area:
Christian Stephan, Medizinisches Proteom Center, Ruhr-Universität Bochum, Bochum
Keywords: Proteomics, Bioinformatics, Biostatistics, Software development, quantitative Proteomics
Albert Sickmann, Leibniz-Institut für Analytische Wissenschaften, Dortmund
Key Words: Bioanalytics, Protein Chemistry, System Biology, Mass Spectrometry, Posttranslational Modifications
Kai Stühler, Medizinisches Proteom Center, Ruhr-Universität Bochum, Bochum
Key Words: Tissue Proteomics, Neurooncology, Mass Spectrometry, 2D-DIGE, PAGE, Neuroproteomics
The editors look forward to more submissions in this area of growing importance.
Did you know... your submission may be checked! You can also check yourself now
CrossCheck is an initiative started by CrossRef to help Publishers actively engage in efforts to prevent plagiarism. Although there are several plagiarism screening tools already available, they are not well-suited to filtering academic content simply because they haven't had access to the relevant full-text literature to screen against. CrossCheck changes this by creating and continuously growing a database of current and archival scholarly literature. Plagiarism prevention software provider iParadigms has announced a new service that provides individual authors, researchers and freelance writers access to the company's iThenticate solution. The new service, currently available at http://research.ithenticate.com, allows individuals to cross-reference their manuscripts against a massive database of scholarly material in the STM fields with the goal of vetting their material, ensuring that any non-original content is accurately and comprehensively cited before submission. Our Executive Editors now use this tool to help identify cases of scientific misconduct.
Archives of Biochemistry and Biophysics – Latest Special Issue now online!
P450 Catalysis Mechanisms, Edited by F. Peter Guengerich
Volume 507, Issue 1, Pages 1-204 (1 March 2011)
This special issue of Archives of Biochemistry and Biophysics on catalytic mechanisms is dedicated to Professor Minor J. Coon, of the University of Michigan Medical School, on the occasion of his 90th birthday (July 29, 2011). His seminal contributions in the cytochrome P450 (P450) field over a period of three decades have been truly remarkable
Journal of Proteomics adds strength in Bioinformatics
The Journal of Proteomics is pleased to announce the appointment of Akhilesh Pandey as new Executive Editor covering Bioinformatics, replacing Peter Hojrup whose term has come to an end. We are grateful for Peter's contributions in the past few years.
The editorial board has also be strengthened with expertise in this area with the addition of several new board members:
Michael McCoss - University of Washington, Dept of Genome Sciences, Seattle, USA
Pavel Pevzner - Dept of Computer Science & Engineering, UCSD, La Jolla, USA
Harsha Gowda - Institute of Bioinformatics, Bangalore, India
Hanno Steen, Children's Hospital Boston, USA
The editors look forward to more submissions in this area of growing importance.
Progress in Lipid Research announces new Executive Editor: Dr. Markus R. Wenk
The prestigious, high impact review journal Progress in Lipid Research is pleased to announce the appointment of Markus Wenk as Executive Editor of the journal. Markus Wenk will replace two editors, Dennis Voelker and Gerrit van Meer, who just retired at year end and whose major contribution to the success of the journal is greatly acknowledged. We are pleased to welcome such a distinguished expert in the growing field of lipidomics to the board of the journal and look forward to many interesting and authoritative review articles in the years to come. Your suggestions for new topics to be covered are welcome at any time. Please feel free to contact one of the editors: John Harwood (Cardiff), Masahiro Nishijima (Tokyo) or Markus Wenk (Singapore).
Contact details: Markus R. WENK Associate Professor, National University of Singapore, website: http://www.lipidprofiles.com
MAJOR RESEARCH INTEREST: Application of lipid profiling ("lipidomics") as a novel and independent approach for the systems level scale analysis of biological systems.
Developments for a Growing Japanese Patient Population: Facilitating New Technologies for Future Health Care
The next generation of personalized drugs for targeted and stratified patient treatment will soon be available in major disease areas such as, lifestyle-related cancers, especially lung cancers with the highest mortality including a predisposing disorder chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, cardiovascular disease, and other diseases. Mass spectrometric technologies can provide the "phenotypic fingerprint" required for the concept of Personalized Medicine.
Structured Digital Abstacts
FEBS Letters is the first journal to link novel protein-protein interactions that are described in the manuscript directly to a molecular interaction database. Find out more about Structured Digital Abstacts.
Nature Biotechnology also published an article this year related to structured digital abstracts representations titled 'The FEBS Lettters / BioCreative II.5 experiment: making biological information accessible'.
Highlighted Review
Biopersistent fiber-induced inflammation and carcinogenesis: Lessons learned from asbestos toward safety of fibrous nanomaterials. Nano-sized durable fibrous materials such as carbon nanotubes have raised safety concerns similar to those raised by asbestos. However, the mechanism by which particulates with ultrafine structure cause inflammation and ultimately cancer (e.g. malignant mesothelioma and lung cancer) is largely unknown. This is partially because the particulates are not uniform and they vary in a plethora of factors. Such variances include length, diameter, surface area, density, shape, contaminant metals (including iron) and crystallinity. Various kinds of fibers were evaluated with different cells, animals and methods. The aim of this review is to concisely summarize previous reports from the standpoint that activation of macrophages and mesothelial injury are the two major mechanisms of inflammation and possibly cancer.
BBRC Editor wins the Nencki Award 2010
Professor Ernesto Carafoli (Italy/Switzerland) was awarded the second edition of the Nencki Prize 2010.
Professor Carafoli is a world-renowned specialist in the role of calcium as signalling molecule in cell metabolism as well as in Ca2+ transport across biological membranes. He is also expert in calcium homeostasis in the cell and the role of Ca2+ in the regulation of cellular metabolism. Carafoli was one of the first to discover energy-dependent accumulation of calcium within mitochondria. Then, he studied the calcium pump of the plasma membrane and contributed to its isolation, purification and characterization as an enzyme (“Ca2+-pumping ATPase”). More recently, Ernesto Carafoli became involved in studying various aspects Ca2+ function as signalling molecule, in particular in the nucleus. Read the full announcement
FEBS Telomeres Special Issue
The Special Issue features in-depth reviews of telomere biology and DNA repair.
Edited by Jan Karlseder and Wilhelm Just
Volume 584, Issue 17, Pages 3673-3838 (10 September 2010)
BBA Reviews on Cancer expands in the field of BIOINFORMATICS – Jill Mesirov joins as Editor
BBA Reviews on Cancer is pleased to announce the appointment of Jill Mesirov on the Board of Editors, to reinforce the journal’s expertise in this important growing area.
Jill Mesirov is associate director and chief informatics officer at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, where she directs Computational Biology and Bioinformatics. Jill is also a member of the David H. Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research at MIT and adjunct professor of bioinformatics at Boston University. Her current research interest is computational biology with a focus on algorithms and analytic methodologies for pattern recognition and discovery with applications to cancer genomics, genome analysis and interpretation, and comparative genomics. In addition, Jill is committed to the development of practical, accessible software tools to bring these methods to the general biomedical research community. The journal welcomes reviews on cancer bioinformatics.
Structural data - Revised Guide to Authors for ABB
Archives in Biochemistry and Biophysics has revised its Instructions to Authors to include the following requirement:
For papers describing structures of biological macromolecules, the atomic coordinates and the related experimental data (structure factor amplitudes/intensities and/or NMR restraints) must be deposited at a member site of the Worldwide Protein Data Bank, RCSB PDB, MSD-EBI, PDBj, or BMRB. Read revised instructions
All authors publishing structural data are requested to strictly adhere to these guidelines, to support interactive structures as a future enhancement of the online journal.
Graphical Abstracts in Journal of Proteomics – revised instructions to authors
Protein Bioinformatics - submissions are welcome
BBA - Proteins and Proteomics has revised its Aims & Scope statement to more explicitly welcome manuscript submissions in the growing area of PROTEIN BIOINFORMATICS. Please find the revised scope statement below:
BBA's Proteins and Proteomics section covers protein structure conformation and dynamics, protein folding, protein-ligand interactions, enzyme mechanisms, models and kinetics, protein physical properties and spectroscopy, proteomics, and bioinformatics analyses of protein structure, protein function, or protein regulation.
Concise and comprehensive reviews of recent developments are considered for publication. However, authors are strongly advised to consult one of the Executive Editors before starting a review.
Journal e-submission site: http://ees.elsevier.com/bbapro/
BBA Gene Regulatory Mechanisms - title change and call for submissions
Given the changing landscape of the field, the emphasis of BBA Gene Structure and Expression has been redirected to BBA Gene Regulatory Mechanisms. This section now includes reports that describe novel insights into mechanisms of transcriptional, post-transcriptional and translational gene regulation. Special emphasis will be placed on papers that identify epigenetic mechanisms of gene regulation, including chromatin structure and its modification or remodeling. This section will also encompass mechanistic studies of regulatory proteins and protein complexes; regulatory or mechanistic aspects of RNA processing; regulation of expression by small RNAs; genomic analysis of gene expression patterns; and modeling of gene regulatory networks. Papers describing gene promoters, enhancers, silencers or other regulatory DNA regions will be accepted only if they present significant functional studies that illuminate novel features of gene regulatory mechanisms. We encourage scientists exploring the many facets of gene regulatory mechanisms to consider this refocused and revitalized section of BBA. We wholeheartedly welcome you to submit your latest research articles to BBA Gene Regulatory Mechanisms as an appropriate outlet for publication of exciting, innovative and significant advances. To submit, visit: http://ees.elsevier.com/bbagrm/
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Charting a Course for a Successful Research Career
A Guide for Early Career Researchers - Get this 120-page booklet for free!
- Figure Manipulation
BBA has added new text to its Guide to Authors to deal with figure manipulation. See also ORI's Forensic Tools for Quick Examination of Scientific Images and Plagiarism for more on this subject.