What is your top 2011 MSB paper?

Below is a list of the top 10 most read research articles published in Molecular Systems Biology in 2011, based on combined HTML and PDF access.  The work by Saeidi et al, in particular, received widespread media coverage for making a practical first-step toward fighting infections with engineered microbes (e.g. at Science NOW, Ed Yong’s blog at Discover Magazine, Nature, and TheScientist).  Read more

Matthias Mann awarded Louis-Jeantet Prize for medicine

The Louis-Jeantet Foundation awarded its prestigious 2012 Louis-Jeantet Prize for medicine to Matthias Mann last Tuesday, Jan 24th, for his contributions to mass spectrometry and the field of proteomics.  Matthias Mann, Director of the Department of Proteomics and Signal Transduction at the Max-Planck Institute of Biochemistry in Martinsried, and his co-workers have developed several of the key technologies that have made modern proteomics possible, including mass spectrometry-based identification of proteins from electrophoretic gels and the SILAC method that underlies many recent quantitative proteomics studies. The foundation highlighted, in particular, his quantitative analyses of cancer cell proteomes, and the promise this work may hold for the future diagnosis and treatment of cancer (e.g. Geiger et al, 2010; Lundberg et al, 2010; Nagaraj et al,  2011).  Read more

Updated Instructions for Authors

Molecular Systems Biology has recently completed a major update of its Instructions for Authors. Of particular importance, this new document now fully incorporates information about our policies regarding transparency in scientific publishing. Molecular Systems Biology, along with the other EMBO Publications journals, has made a strong commitment to promoting transparency in the editorial process, and recently began publishing a Review Process File, containing anonymous reviewers’ reports, authors’ rebuttal letters, and the editor’s decisions, with accepted manuscripts. In addition, we have been working to promote greater availability, transparency, and re-usability for scientific data associated with published works. For more details on these efforts please see our editorial, “From bench to website.”  … Read more

Editors’ Conference Agenda – 2011

Here is a preliminary list of conferences that the Molecular Systems Biology editors will be attending in 2011. We are looking forward seeing a lot of the Alps this year, with meetings in Innsbruck, Geneva, and Vienna. And, of course, we also looking forward to meeting Molecular Systems Biology’s readers and authors; if you are attending one of these conferences or workshops, we would be quite happy to chat with you and learn about your research.  Read more

[Research highlight] Transcription in action

In a work just published at Nature, Churchman and Weissman (2011) describe a new method for directly capturing and sequencing elongating, or nascent, RNA transcripts. The authors then use this method to provide a detailed look at the transcriptional process in action, revealing a histone modification-dependent mechanism that constrains genome-wide antisense transcription, and pervasive transcriptional pausing and backtracking throughout genes.  Read more

[Research highlight] modENCODE releases extensive functional investigation of fly and worm genomes

Recently, a series of publications by members of the modENCODE consortium were released online at Science, Nature, and Genome Research. These works collectively describe a massive effort to functionally characterize and annotate the Drosophila melanogaster and Caenorhabditis elegans genomes, including in-depth analyses of genes and transcripts, epigenetic marks, transcription factor binding, and replication timing, across a range of developmental and tissue sources.  Read more

[Research highlight] Laws of microbial growth

In a work recently published in Science, Scott et al reveal a series of microbial “growth laws” that describe simple relationships between translation, nutrition, and cellular growth. They show that these laws hold across different experimental perturbations and E. coli strains, and, ultimately, provide a phenomenological model describing the delicate balancing act cells maintain when deciding how much of their proteome to allocate to ribosome-related processes.  Read more