JIPB's Editorial Board Meeting 2009: A New Face in 2010

The annual editorial board meeting of JIPB, which this year coincided with the 2009 Integrative Plant Biology Symposium in the seaside town of Yantai, China, was recently concluded. Twenty-four editors attended the very constructive meeting (Figure 1). The symposium, partially sponsored by JIPB, at-tracted more than 300 participants from Chinese universities and research organizations.     

Interdisciplinary assessment of adherence to guidelines: a bold step

Guidelines from professional societies have acquired a prominent position in medicine. Conceived with the purpose of assisting clinicians in daily decision-making, they now delineate entitlements of patients, including reimbursements, they provide a basis for professional audits and, not the least important, they provide a framework for legal procedures.     

Meeting report: 2012 Caenorhabditis elegans Neurobiology meeting, EMBL Advanced Training Centre, Germany

Some of the finest minds in the field of Caenorhabditis elegans neurobiology were brought together from 14 June to 17 June 2012 in the small, quaint and picturesque German city of Heidelberg for the biannual C. elegans neurobiology conference. Held at the EMBL Advanced Training Centre and wonderfully organised by Diah Yulianti, Jean-Louis Bessereau, Gert Jansen and William Schafer, the meeting contained 62 verbal presentations and hundreds of posters that were displayed around the double-helical walkways that looped throughout the conference centre. Presentations on recent advances in microfluidics, cell ablation and targeted gene expression exemplified the strengths of C. elegans as a model organism, with these advances allowing detailed high-throughput analysis and study. Interesting behaviours that were previously poorly characterised were widely discussed, as were the advantages of C. elegans as a model for neurodevelopment and neurodegeneration and the investigation of neuropeptide function. The examples discussed in this meeting report seek to illustrate the breadth and depth of presentations given on these recurring topics.     

A protecting group-free synthesis of deazathiamine: a step toward inhibitor design

The discovery of 3-deazathiamine diphosphate (deazaThDP) as a potent inhibitor analog of the cofactor thiamine diphosphate (ThDP) has highlighted the need for an efficient and scalable synthesis of deazaThDP. Such a method would facilitate development of analogs with the ability to inhibit individual ThDP-dependent enzymes selectively. Toward the goal of developing selective inhibitors of the mycobacterial enzyme 2-hydroxy-3-oxoadipate synthase (HOAS), we report an improved synthesis of deazaThDP without use of protecting groups. Tribromo-3-methylthiophene served as a versatile starting material whose selective functionalization permitted access to deazaThDP in five steps, with potential to make other analogs accessible in substantial amounts.     

A step closer toward making many from the one

Somatic embryogenesis (SE) is a key technique used in plant biotechnology. The complex molecular changes associated with SE are uncharacterized in many crop species, and therefore, logically, formulating the culture conditions that induce these changes is difficult. In a study published in this issue of Physiologia Plantarum, Marimuthu et al. (2019) performed a proteomic study to characterize the molecular reprogramming during SE of an elite banana cultivar. Based on the results, they could customize culture conditions for optimal SE efficiency in several cultivars.