Commentaries and Letters to the Editor of The Plant Cell

As Editor-in-Chief of a high-ranking journal, I, along with the features editors and the editorial board of The Plant Cell, spend a considerable amount of time discussing aspects of plant biology outside our immediate fields, trying to gauge the most important breakthroughs in areas as diverse as ecology, structural biology, evolutionary theory, and signaling that are of particular relevance to plants. Occasionally, we hear comments critical of the data and conclusions reported in articles that have been informally brought into question by some scientists in the field, even though they have been published in high-ranking journals (including this one). Such comments are of concern for several reasons: the possible failure of the peer review system, the possibility of unaware postdocs or students being set to work on ill-founded projects, and the fact that the evidence critical of the published work has not been disseminated and no scientists have had the chance to evaluate whether or not those generalized statements and views are reliable. It seems that there should be a forum where scientists can present cases where they have tested hypotheses proposed by other’s work and queries have arisen or where a technical problem, newly discovered, impacts significantly on past and future work. We believe that The Plant Cell is the appropriate forum for publication and debate of these types of commentaries related to plant biology. Although such articles do not require the same depth of experimental data as regular research articles, readers may be assured that all Commentaries and Letters to the Editor (as well as Reviews and Perspectives) published in The Plant Cell are rigorously peer reviewed and must be judged to meet the high standards of the journal with respect to the level of scholarship, the level of interest to the scientific community, and the reliability of methods employed and data presented (if new data are included). Reviewers are asked to consider and comment on the overall suitability for publication in The Plant Cell and whether or not the authors have presented an accurate and well-balanced discussion that will be of significant value to the plant science community. In addition, any author whose work is the subject of such a commentary is offered the chance of rebuttal, and all rebuttal letters are also subjected to independent peer review.

We have published such commentaries and letters in the past, and will continue to do so, where we believe that the information provided is of interest and is useful to the wider plant science community. Examples of such articles include Ntoukakis et al. (2011), which provided cautionary notes on the use of C-terminal BAK1 fusion proteins; Dubrovsky and Forde (2012), on how to avoid pitfalls in the quantitative analysis of lateral root development, and a companion article on analyzing lateral root development and how to move forward by De Smet et al. (2012); Udvardi et al. (2008) on the 11 golden rules of quantitative RT-PCR; and Westphal et al. (2008) on the presence of a second site mutation in the coi1-16 mutant rendering PEN2 nonfunctional.

Some months ago, The Plant Cell received a commentary from Cyril Zipfel and colleagues relating to the physiological significance of data reported by Lee et al. (2011) on the CLV3 peptide ligand being recognized by the receptor FLS2 in signaling the immune response in plants. A short while later, a second commentary was submitted by Georg Felix and colleagues reporting incidences of flg22 contamination in preparations of peptide ligands prepared commercially or in house and the implications of such contamination on interpreting FLS2 signaling. These commentaries have been peer reviewed, revised, and are now published in The Plant Cell (Segonzac et al., 2012; Mueller et al., 2012). The commentaries were also presented to the authors of the original manuscripts that they addressed (Danna et al., 2011; Lee et al., 2011). Those authors have written rebuttal Letters to the Editor (Danna et al., 2012; Lee et al., 2012) to explain the physiological relevance of their observations, and they present data arguing against the possibility of Flg22 contamination in their experiments. These rebuttals have been peer reviewed as well, and all the articles and all the correspondence concerning them have been considered carefully by members of the editorial board of The Plant Cell. To be as fair as possible to all authors and to provide the readership with the best package of information on which to base their own conclusions, publication of the Segonzac et al. and Mueller et al. commentaries was delayed temporarily until all four articles were ready to be published together. The editors of The Plant Cell feel that they have taken responsibility for opening up the scientific debate on FLS2 and innate immune signaling, and they have gone as far as possible to ensure a fair and balanced discussion of issues of particular interest to its readership. It is now up to you, our readers, to decide on the issues under debate and to plan your work and research accordingly. It also would be interesting to learn whether plant biologists find these debates useful in understanding their field and in undertaking their own research.