Editorial

We wish readers a prosperous year and remind you that the journal,in addition to the Advance Access electronic edition, will bepublished every two months so there will be six issues in 2007instead of the four in 2006. In this first issue for 2007, wehave articles about     

Impact analysis of a regional scientific journal (1980-2000): supporting promising local researchers pays the greatest dividends

During the past 28 years, the journal "Collegium Antropologicum" has continuously served as one of the main disseminators of anthropological scientific production in Central and Eastern Europe. The journal was committed to its role of a multidisciplinary platform for presenting wide range of research topics relevant to anthropology, from investigations within social and cultural anthropology and archaeology to those covering contemporary population genetics, human evolution and biomedical issues. Two key strategies aimed at sustaining and increasing the impact of this journal were oriented towards: (i) identification of promising local groups of researchers who were at disadvantage by many aspects (e.g. educational curricula, financial supports, language barriers etc.) when trying to publish their research internationally, and (ii) invitation and encouragement of already established international scientists to make contributions for "Collegium Antropologicum". From 1980-2000, 89 articles (or 6.3% of all published papers during that period) were cited 6 or more times, contributing disproportionately to journal's impact (nearly a third of all citations received). In an attempt to identify such papers more readily among the submissions to the journal in the future, we analyzed research topics and affiliations of the authors among the 89 papers receiving most citations in comparison to all papers published. Among the papers most frequently cited, we found greater-than-expected prevalence of Croatian researchers (especially when publishing in collaboration with international scientists) and studies of special populations. Several papers received more than 25 citations or had overall citation intensity greater than 2 per year. This implies that an interesting article from a local group of researchers can still resonate with international audience although published in a regional journal. Present analysis supports current editorial strategy that with a help of the international consulting editorial board continuously improves international recognition of this journal. The results imply that a balanced encouragement to promising local groups of researchers and to contributions of already established international scientists is a strategy superior to others in maintaining and increasing the impact of this regional journal.     

HTLV-1 p30II: selective repressor of gene expression

Retrovirology has been publishing as an Open Access online journal for approximately six months. In this editorial, I review the reasons for and the advantages of Open Access publishing, update our progress to date, and summarize where we intend to go with this journal.     

1998-2007年主要国家（地区）H5N1禽流感相关SCI文献统计分析

H5N1流感病毒引起的禽流感造成了大量禽类的死亡,并且有越来越多人感染病例的发生。在本文中,我们利用PubMed数据库检索H5N1禽流感相关文献,并筛选出SCI文献进行文献数量的年度变化、国家（地区）分布、主要研究机构等方面的统计分析,以此探讨禽流感文献的分布规律和禽流感研究现状与趋势,为我国的H5N1禽流感研究提供参考。     

Letter from the Editor

This is the first issue of Epigenetics, which is the first international periodical focusing on the newly emerging field of epigenetics and is the official journal of the DNA Methylation Society. Our goal is that Epigenetics will be the lead primary journal in the field of epigenetics and will provide a comprehensive view of epigenetic modification, which spans biological systems and diseases. This diversity of themes and comprehensive approach to epigenetics is reflected in the composition of our editorial board, which includes world-class leaders in the different fields of epigenetics. The editorial board guides the peer review process and the development of the vision of the journal. We encourage members of the epigenetics community to contact the editorial board members with suggestions and questions regarding potential new submissions to the journal.

The journal will provide a forum where epigenetic approaches to a variety of medical and biological issues could be discussed and where the common basic principles of epigenetics spanning different systems could be revealed and shared. Although cancer has been the main focus of epigenetics in the last decade, recent data suggests that epigenetic plays a critical role in psychology andpsychopathology. It is being realized that normal behaviors such as maternal care and pathologies such as Schizophrenia and Alzheimer’s might have an epigenetic basis. It is also becoming clear that nutrition and life experiences have epigenetic consequences.

The increasing awareness of the potential role of epigenetic deregulation in disease has spawned the development of diagnostic and therapeutic approaches using epigenetics. Although the questions asked are diverse, the unifying hypothesis is epigenetics. The journal will emphasize scientific rigor but will at the same time promote and encourage open mindedness as well as provocative and novel hypotheses and approaches. The journal will provide a platform for developing unifying methodologies,hypotheses, experimental approaches and diagnostic agents and will serve as a meeting place for researchers from different systems such as general biology, plant biology, cancer biology, cancer therapeutics, epigenetic pharmacology, neurobiology and psychiatry who are unraveling the epigenetic facets of their specific fields of interest.

We recognize that our first issue is just a first small step, but we hope that it will be leading to a great journal, which will serve as the flagship of the epigenetics field. The success of the journal depends on the continuous and unswerving support of the epigenetics community by submitting the best papers to the journal, by participation in the review process and the editorial process and by contribution of suggestions and ideas.

Our first issue includes examples of each of the different areas, which we hope to see covered in the journal in the future. The issue starts with a meeting report of the Environmental Epigenomics conference held at Durham North Carolina in November 2005. This report points out the prospect that the environment sculpts our genomes through epigenetic markings and that some of these markings might be passed through the germ line. This emerging relationship between the environment and our epigenomes impacts on our understanding of the relative role of genetic heredity and environmental exposures in normal behavior and disease susceptibility. The key promise in an epigenetic understanding of human disease is its potential reversibility by therapeutic agents. Our two reviews discuss pharmacological and therapeutic approaches directed at the two components ofthe epigenome DNA methylation (Mund et al., pp. 7–13) and chromatin structure (Kim et al., pp. 14–23). Karimi et al. discuss a new method LUMA for quantification of global DNA methylation, and Baron et al. (pp. 55–60) discuss DNA methylation as a tool for cell typing. A new mode of Igf2r imprinting in opossum which does not involve DNA methylation is discussed by Weidman et al. (pp. 49–54) and Rivenbark et al. (pp. 32–44) show that not all gene targets of DNA methylation in breast cancer will contain a CpG island and they propose expansion of the current model for methylation-dependent regulation of gene expression to include genes lacking typical CpG islands.

Thatcher and Lasalle (pp. 24–33) show the global effects that the methylated DNA binding protein Mecp2 has on histone acetylation and modification during postnatal neuronal maturation, a finding, which has interesting implications on our understanding of the MeCP2 deficiency Rett syndrome. Our small first fruits do give us a glimpse of the different facets of the field from DNA methylation to chromatin, from methods development to diagnostics and from the environment totherapeutics. We hope that with the support of the members of the epigenetics community we will be able to establish a journal, of which we all will be proud.     

Trapped in keratin; a comparison of dermatophyte detection in nail, skin and hair samples directly from clinical samples using culture and real-time PCR

Traditionally, laboratory detection and identification of dermatophytes consists of culture and microscopy which yields results within approximately 2-6 weeks. In 2007 our medical microbiological diagnostic laboratory implemented a molecular method for the detection of dermatophytes. A real-time PCR assay was developed which simultaneously detects and identifies the most prevalent dermatophytes directly in nail, skin and hair samples and has a turnaround time of less than two days. For 1437 clinical samples, received by our diagnostic laboratory, we compared the results obtained from both culture and real-time PCR. This study showed that real-time PCR significantly increased the detection rate of dermatophytes compared to culture. Furthermore, excellent concordance between culture and real-time PCR identification was achieved.     

Setting the Record Straight on Data Supporting Postnatal Oogenesis in Female Mammals

Of all the ‘certainties’ in mammalian female reproductive biology, the concept that a non-renewing oocyte reserve is set forth in the ovaries at birth may be the most longstanding and widely held. However, when data from our studies of oocyte apoptosis unintentionally began to contradict this theory in the latter part of 2002, we embarked on an investigation, unbiased by any pre-conceived dogmas, to determine if oocyte production persists in adult female mice. In 2004, we presented our first experimental findings in the journal Nature, which indicated that oogenesis indeed continues in adulthood. Amidst widespread skepticism, we moved forward with our studies and this year published our follow-up experiments in the journal Cell. Results from this latter body of work not only reinforced our earlier conclusions but also identified bone marrow as a surprising source of oocyte-producing germ cells in adults. Although this study has also been met with skepticism, doubts raised in commentaries on our work are largely based on inaccurate or incomplete assessments of our experimental models and results. Here we have attempted to clarify published misperceptions and misinterpretations of our data, and offer additional insights that challenge the idea of fixed endowment of oocytes at birth.     

Moscow University Biological Sciences Bulletin—a new era of evolution (2007–2013)

The paper considers the history of how the scientific journal Moscow University Biological Sciences Bulletin (MUBSB) evolved during the last 7 years. It is the English edition of the Russian scientific peer-reviewed journal of the School of Biology of Lomonosov Moscow State University MSU Vestnik (Herald). Series 16. Biology. MUBSB is published by Allerton Press, a member of the Nauka/Interperiodica International Academic Publishing Company since 2007. The rapid progress of MUBSB in recent years is apparently due to the journal having been distributed since 2007 by the internationally renowned Springer publishing consortium that places electronic versions of all articles on its website, which has, to all appearances, led to a manifold increase in the number of journal subscribers. As a result, the number of downloads of MUBSB papers from the publishing company website also raised by an order of magnitude from 2007 to 2013. The growing popularity of the journal is noted to have lead to its inclusion in a number of international databases, and this, in turn, has increased its attractiveness for a large number of authors, including Russian nonmembers of Moscow State University, as well as scientists from research institutes and universities of other countries. The main features of the spectrum of the papers published in MUBSB are briefly considered.     

Erratum to: Pick of the Year 2014

In June 2015, Thomson Reuters informed our publisher Springer that the Journal of Cell Communication and Signaling, the official journal of the International CCN Society, « had been selected for coverage in Thomson Reuter’s products and services. Beginning with V. 1 (1) 2007, this publication would be indexed and abstracted in Science Citation Index Expanded (also known as SciSearch), Journal Citation Reports/Science Edition, Biological Abstracts and BIOSIS Previews ». In this fall editorial I briefly revisit a few milestones of the JCCS life since it was first created in 1988, with the deep and genuine willingness to help in the dissemination, in the highly competitive world of publishing, of the best quality science regarding the roles of CCN proteins in signaling.     

Primate molecular phylogenetics in a genomic era

A primary objective of molecular phylogenetics is to use molecular data to elucidate the evolutionary history of living organisms. Dr. Morris Goodman founded the journal Molecular Phylogenetics and Evolution as a forum where scientists could further our knowledge about the tree of life, and he recognized that the inference of species trees is a first and fundamental step to addressing many important evolutionary questions. In particular, Dr. Goodman was interested in obtaining a complete picture of the primate species tree in order to provide an evolutionary context for the study of human adaptations. A number of recent studies use multi-locus datasets to infer well-resolved and well-supported primate phylogenetic trees using consensus approaches (e.g., supermatrices). It is therefore tempting to assume that we have a complete picture of the primate tree, especially above the species level. However, recent theoretical and empirical work in the field of molecular phylogenetics demonstrates that consensus methods might provide a false sense of support at certain nodes. In this brief review we discuss the current state of primate molecular phylogenetics and highlight the importance of exploring the use of coalescent-based analyses that have the potential to better utilize information contained in multi-locus data.     

Florigen （Ⅱ）： It is a Mobile Protein

The true identity of florigen - the molecule（s） that migrates from leaves to apical meristem to initiate flowering - was notoriously elusive, having made it almost the ＂Bigfoot＂ of plant biology. There was never a lack of drama in the field of florigen study, and florigen researchers have once again experienced such a swing in the last two years. We wrote a minireview last year in this journal （Yu et al. 2006） to excitedly salute, among other discoveries, the notion that the flowering locus T （FT） mRNA might be the molecular form of a florigen. However, this hypothesis was challenged in a little less than two years after its initial proposition, and the original paper proposed that the FT mRNA hypothesis was retracted （Huang et al. 2005; Bohlenius et al. 2007）. Interestingly enough, the FT gene previously proposed to encode a florigen was never challenged. Rather, the FT protein, instead of the FT mRNA, is now believed to migrate from leaves to the apical meristem to promote floral initiation. In this update, we will share with our readers some entertaining stories concerning the recent studies of florigen in five different plant species. In addition to the published reports referenced inthis update, readers may also refer to our previous minireview and references therein for additional background information （Yu et al. 2006）.     

Testing the level of ant activity associated with quorum sensing: an empirical approach leading to the establishment and test of a null-model (response to the comment of Richardson et al.)

In a paper in this journal (Nouvellet et al., 2010), we presented results from experiments on the behaviour of the Pharaoh's ant, Monomorium pharaonis, along with a substantial statistical and theoretical analysis of the results. In a minor part of our paper, we compared our results with the related work of Richardson et al. (2010a). These authors have subsequently commented on our interpretation of their work (Richardson et al., 2011). In this Letter we respond to the comments of Richardson et al. (2011), and give detailed arguments why we stand by our original conclusions.     

Reflections on classic papers in Ethnic and Racial Studies

This paper provides an overview of this Special Issue celebrating the 40th anniversary of Ethnic and Racial Studies. We discuss some of the themes that are covered in this issue in the context of the wider history of the journal. We argue that the journal has worked over the years both to publish the highest quality original research and to feature scholarship in emerging subfields that have helped to broaden both our scope and reach across the globe. In addition we highlight some of the contribution that the journal has made to the development of both established and new areas of scholarship in its field throughout the world.     

PCP in 2003: rapid reviewing and rapid publication

Introduction of Online Submission and Review System and its Current Situation 2002 has been a very exciting year for Plant and Cell Physiology.During the last fiscal year we received 367 newly submittedarticles, the largest growth ever. PCP leads the new frontier of online journals. In July 2000,PCP started as an online journal, and an online submission andreview system was introduced last May. This online submissionand review system runs smoothly and two rapid papers that weresubmitted online were published in the July issue. AlthoughPCP still