Guest Commentary by Guangshun Wang* We are living in an era of antibiotic resistance; fortunately, there is widespread recognition of the consequences of this dilemma. While scientists have long been fascinated by the impressive diversity of antimicrobial peptides (also called host defense peptides) that exist in bacteria, protozoa, fungi, plants, and animals, there is a […]

Guest Post by Franck Vazquez* During the last two decades the Central Dogma of Biology, which states that genetic information flows from DNA into messenger RNAs (mRNAs) via transcription, and from mRNAs into functional proteins via translation, has been shown to be far more complicated than what had long been accepted. Indeed, cells transcribe thousands of RNAs, which neither […]

Our journals received nearly 20’000 manuscript submissions in 2013, or about 75 submissions per business day. It is a logistical challenge to handle this number of incoming manuscripts, to screen them appropriately, expedite them to external peer-review and to communicate with authors to keep them informed and advise them on revisions. More than 100 in-house […]

Guest Commentary by Anamaris Colberg-Poley* Human cytomegalovirus (HCMV) is the major cause of congenital birth infections in developed countries.  HCMV can cause severe birth defects including microcephaly, mental retardation, sensorineural hearing loss, and intrauterine growth restriction. However, because of the potential for teratogenicity and toxic effects, no therapeutic treatment is currently approved by the Food […]

Glycoproteins are formed through protein glycosylation, the post-translational addition and processing of covalently bound oligosaccharide chains. Variations in the glycoform of proteins result from multiple factors in this process, such as enzyme and substrate availability, and these differences can influence the stability and biological function of the protein1.

Scientific publishing, and communication in general, has changed rapidly and radically over the past 20 years. With the advent of the Internet, communication and publishing has become affordable to all, to the point that one only needs a few megabytes of online space, a HTML editor and a word processor to claim to be a […]