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editorial
. 2022 Apr 21;14(2):423–425. doi: 10.1007/s12551-022-00954-6

Editors’ Roundup: April 2022

Keith Shearwin 1, Haruki Nakamura 2, Lawrence Berliner 3, Damien Hall 4,5,✉
PMCID: PMC9043088  PMID: 35528038

Abstract

This Commentary represents the first instalment of a regular feature that seeks to fulfil one of Biophysical Reviews’ IUPAB mandated goals—that of assisting in the international promotion of biophysical research. Known as the ‘Editors’ Roundup’, this Commentary feature is a multi-author collective description of recently published research from journals publishing material across the biophysical realm. Although Biophysical Reviews is published by Springer-Nature, the source of contributed articles is unrestricted and can include different commercial and society publishers. In this edition we have article descriptions from the following journals, Biophysical Reviews, Biophysics and Physicobiology and Cell Biochemistry and Biophysics.

A popular strategy in modern business practice is concerned with the concept of cross-level or multi-level marketing (Emek et al. 2011). Although this type of corporate approach may seem somewhat of an abstract idea to most academic researchers, its practical manifestation is immediately obvious to all scientists who have.

  • (i)

    downloaded an article to be immediately prompted if they would also like to download other articles from the same Issue

  • (ii)

    read an Issue’s content description with the paper copy or website’s side banner containing advertisements for other articles of interest from sister journals within the same publishing company.

Speaking plainly, such cross-level marketing is primarily concerned with boosting the consumption/uptake/citation of work associated with the particular corporation or society engaging in the activity. Although such in-house strategies make corporate sense, they are necessarily parochial in their outlook and at their core have no interest in promoting work existing outside of their affiliated sphere. To remedy this situation, a non-affiliated, truly ‘philanthropic’ booster of biophysical research, would be advantageous.

Due to its intimate associations with the nonprofit organizations of IUPAB (International Union for Pure and Applied Biophysics) (IUPAB 2022) and the ISC (International Science Council) (ISC 2022), the ‘Biophysical Reviews’ journal is tasked with the purpose of promoting biophysical research and therefore is ideally placed to fill this philanthropic void. In pursuit of this aim, we have started this regular commentary feature known as the ‘Editors’ Roundup’. This Commentary is open to any legitimate commercial or society-based journal which has a previously defined interest in publishing papers concerned with biophysics. A member of an interested journal’s Editorial Board may submit a short description (less than 300 words) of up to five articles chosen from amongst their journal’s recent publications (within the last 2 years). These individual submissions are combined into this collective commentary with authorship shared amongst those who contribute. Ideally, these recommendations will carry with it the personal seal and associated professional reputation of the recommender—a situation too often missing in algorithmic recommendations made on the basis of keyword association. Biophysical Reviews’ publication schedule proceeds on a six Issue format. Those interested in contributing are asked to contact either the professional officers of the journal, or the senior members of the Editorial Board, for particular deadlines associated with each Issue.

The current Issue contains contributions from three different journals, with these broken into sections based on the contributor and journal.

Biophysics and Physicobiology

Publisher: Biophysical Society of Japan.

Web:https://www.biophys.jp/biophysics_and_physicobiology.html

Contributor: Haruki Nakamura (Chief Editor).

Biophysics and Physicobiology (BPPB) is the official English language journal of the Biophysical Society of Japan. Operating on a yearly volume structure articles are published and indexed to the Issue in accordance with the time of their acceptance. From the period encompassing the last two years, I have chosen several articles to highlight within this ‘Editors’ Roundup’ Commentary.

The first is the prefatory article to a Special Issue (linked set of articles) within the BPPB that translates a book on biophysically oriented statistical mechanics written by the late Fumio Oosawa (1922–2019)—a true pioneer of biophysics both at home in Japan and world-wide. Translated by a team of young scientists (Masayo Inoue, Meiji University; Noritaka Masaki, National Institute of Genetics; Kiyoshi Ohnuma, Nagaoka University of Technology; Masako Ohtaki; and Taro Toyota, The University of Tokyo), the article can be accessed from the following citation (Editorial team for the Special Issue on Oosawa’s Lectures 2021).

As for the other BPPB contributions, I would like to select the articles, which are the awardees of the BPPB Editors’ Choice Award. In 2021, two articles were the winners of the Award.

  • (i) The paper by Akihiko Nakamura et al. in Shizuoka University revealed that a chitin hydrolase is a pure ‘burnt bridge’ Brownian ratchet motor, which creates a forward bias by shortening of the rail and inhibition of the backward movement (Nakamura et al. 2020).

  • (ii) Ryuma Sato et al. in RIKEN theoretically investigated the electron transfer reactivity and DNA binding affinity of cryptochrome-DASH and also performed supplementary experiments confirming their theoretical findings (Sato et al. 2020).

The Awardees in 2022 for the articles published in 2021 will be selected in the near future.

Cell Biochemistry and Biophysics

Publisher: Springer-Nature.

Web: https://www.springer.com/journal/12013

Contributor: Lawrence Berliner (Chief Editor).

Cell Biochemistry and Biophysics publishes four Issues per year and, as the name implies, is primarily concerned with describing cellular biochemistry in a quantitative and biophysical manner. In this very first Editors’ Roundup Commentary I have chosen to highlight three articles from a recent Special Issue published in 2021 on the topic of ‘Bioactive Lipids in Health and Disease’. Written by his former students and research colleagues, this Issue served as a tribute to the 50th year of active research by Prof. Viswanathan Natarajan of the University of Illinois at Chicago. Amongst the three articles selected, I have included.

  • (i) the Issue Editorial which provides a description of the SI structure and a fuller description of each of the articles within it (Parinandi and Berliner 2021).

  • (ii) a historical account of the discovery, by Harald Schmid and Viswanathan Natarajan, of a new reaction series, known as the trans-acylation phosphodiesterase pathway, which ultimately leads to the formation of the important metabolite N-arachidonoylethanolamine, and which was later established to bind and activate the cannabinoid receptors (Schmid 2021).

  • (iii) an autobiographical description of the life and career of Prof. Viswanathan Natarajan which describes his journey through academia as a lipid biochemist (Natarajan 2021).

Totalling 27 articles in all, the three articles selected from this SI (and described above) provide a good introduction to the motivation and greater contents of the Issue.

Biophysical Reviews

Type: Springer-Nature and IUPAB.

Web: https://www.springer.com/journal/12551

Contributor: Keith Shearwin (Editorial Board).

I have been asked by the Chief Editor of Biophysical Reviews to describe some recently published articles from Biophysical Reviews that I found to be of particular interest. I have chosen to highlight two articles from the just published Special Issue on the Australian Society for Biophysics (ASB). Published in 2022 this SI, consisting of 31 articles, highlighted the wider background underpinning work presented as talks given at the 2021 ASB conference. Although the first three articles (dos Remedios et al. 2022; Hall 2022; Hill 2022) will help to orientate the reader as to the structure and background of the SI, the two particular articles I have chosen to highlight are Reviews on.

  • (i) methodologies specifically aimed at investigating factors affecting the dissociation of the viral coat of the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) as it enters the cell (Zhang et al. 2022), and.

  • (ii) a paper describing the characteristics of an ‘typical’ bacterial cell membrane along with practical methods for its approximation via experimental reconstitution (Carey et al. 2022).

With regard to the first article concerning methods for monitoring HIV uncoating (Zhang et al. 2022), the authors describe the molecular components of the HIV virus along with the pathways of cell entry and uncoating. They then describe useful fluorescent and reactive tag fusion constructs that constitute the experimental toolbox for molecular analysis of the uncoating process along with the appropriate range of microscopy techniques (with various examples involving confocal fluorescence, TIRF microscopy and correlative light and electron microscopy described).

The second paper to be highlighted (Carey et al. 2022) reviews in vitro model membrane systems of the bacterial cell membrane, highlighting the variable parameters associated with composition, geometries and size. The authors discuss both, experimental techniques, based on use of liposomes and supported bilayers, along with computational methods for the investigation of drug/membrane, lipid/protein and host/pathogen interactions. To my mind the article by Carey and colleagues does an excellent job of fulfilling the duties of a Review, clearly defining the area, presenting what is known and unknown and then suggesting some useful ‘ways forward’ for the research community (Carey et al. 2022).

Concluding remarks

The current Commentary constitutes the journal’s first effort in cross posting across any (and hopefully in future many) publishing platforms legitimately concerned with the production of biophysical content. Performed without any commercial business interest, such cross-posting may provide a venue for those looking for an interesting personal recommendation about recently published biophysical content. In keeping with its IUPAB mandate it is hoped that through this commentary format, Biophysical Reviews may further act as a vehicle to facilitate the promulgation and dissemination of biophysical research on an international stage.

Declarations

Conflict of Interest

All authors report no conflict of interest. No humans or animals were harmed during the writing of this article.

Footnotes

Publisher's note

Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

References

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