BiotecVisions 2013, July

Biotechnology Journal (BTJ) is pleased to announce its first Impact Factor® (IF): 3 446! BTJ was launched in 2006 under the guidance of Prof. Hans Günter Gassen (TU Darmstadt, Germany). Since May 2008, the Journal is edited jointly by Prof. Alois Jungbauer (BOKU, Austria) and Prof. Sang Yup Lee (KAIST, South Korea). This unique arrangement has greatly benefited the Journal, both in terms of the scientific as well as geographic coverage. Another major driving force behind the Journal was the previous Managing Editor, Dr. Barbara Janssens. Barbara’s contagious enthusiasm formed the basis of the Journal’s dynamic yet friendly atmosphere, something that I’ve been greatly inspired by and endeavoured to maintain (although difficult to top!) since I took over the reins in 2011. Due to delayed indexing by Web of Science®, our first IF is available only this year. Despite this potential “drawback”, our most loyal followers have continued to support the Journal by submitting their best research and also citing the research papers published in the Journal. Any successful journal requires a team of dedicated Editorial Board members, and BTJ too is proud of the support we’ve had over the years. Our board members are all actively involved in the Journal, providing rigorous, constructive peer-review for the Journal’s authors. Also, our board members have submitted their best research as well as review papers to the Journal, many of which are our top-cited content. Behind the scenes, but vital to the timely publication of the Journal, are our Assistant Editors, Dr. Uta Göbel and Dr. Jing Zhu. Uta and Jing are some of the best ambassadors a journal could wish for – efficient, friendly and professional, not to mention having the scientific expertise to provide the articles with the necessary editorial input. I would like to thank everyone who have contributed to the success of BTJ and look forward to being the platform-of-choice of all biotechnologists in disseminating their scientific achievements.


Producing omega-3 fatty acids in oilseed crops
There is increasing consumer demand for the omega-3 fatty acids docosahexaenoic acid (DHA) and eicosapentaenoic acid (EPA) because of their wellrecognized benefits for human health and the observation that current western diets are deficient in these important polyunsaturated fatty acids (PU-FAs). This has led to the need for additional cost-effective and sustainable dietary sources of DHA and EPA beyond the traditional resource, oceanic fish. Recent advances in plant biotechnology have shown that DHA and EPA can be produced in vegetable oils using two approaches involving different sets of genes. These strategies, described in a Feature article in Lipid Technology, offer the potential for sustainable production of DHA and EPA in land-based oilseed crops. www.wiley.com/go/biotech cism about the introduction of genetic combinations to nature that would not normally naturally exist. Public respect for nature has recently been the focus of new methods of breeding GM crops. Intragenesis and cisgenesis consist of genetically modifying crops with genes from the same species or similar species, which are already capable of sexual hybridization. A variety of GM crops have been modified according to these practises and some now have pending applications for deregulation from EU laws on GM crops. In this review from Plant Biotechnology Journal, the authors present a variety of recent intragenetic and cisgenetic developments, which may become significant for the public acceptance of future plant breeding.

SAPs as novel regulators of abiotic stress response in plants
Stress associated proteins (SAPs) are novel A20/AN1 zinc-finger proteins of plants showing phylogenetic relationship with their homologs in animals. They help protect crop-yield loss due to stress by acting as ubiquitin ligase, re-dox sensor, and regulator of gene expression. Also, they are known regulators of innate immunity in animals.

Glassy state and cryopreservation of mint shoot tips
Vitrification refers to the physical process by which a liquid supercools to very low temperatures and finally solidifies into a metastable glass, without undergoing crystallization at a practical cooling rate. Thus, vitrification is an effective freeze-avoidance mechanism and living tissue cryopreservation is, in most cases, relying on it. As a glass is exceedingly viscous and stops all chemical reactions that require molecular diffusion, its formation leads to metabolic inactivity and stability over time. In this recent Biotechnology Progress article, Aline S. Teixeira and coworkers in-

Getting published: The h-index
Due to limited resources, scientific funding bodies are always faced with the tough decision of which scientific/research projects to fund. To help make these decisions, many funding bodies have used the journal Impact Factor® (IF) as a surrogate marker of the scientific impact of a scientist's output. Of course, we know that the IF measures the average citations of a journal's articles over a certain period of time, which means that the IF is not necessarily a direct reflection of the impact of individual papers. To combat these drawbacks, many funding bodies have now introduced a new factor to complement the IF in their assessment of a scientist's output, i.e. the h-index.
The h-index, is named after its "inventor", Jorge E. Hirsch. Simply put, it states that a researcher has an h-index of h, if he/she has h number of papers that have been cited at least h number of times. Graphically speaking, this looks like: As a researcher competing for scientific funding, your h-index is critically important. How do you go about increasing your h-index?
The h-index boils down to citation and number of papers. It is not enough to be a onehit wonder with one paper that has been cited over 100 times; it is also not enough to have 100 papers that have never been cited.
Citations: while self-citations have been used by some, at the end of the day, only the community can make a real impact on the number of citations that you have. It is therefore critically important to write and present your work in a way that it can be understood by your peers and ensure that it can be discovered by your peers (more on discoverability later).
Collaborations: In many scientific disciplines, collaborations are not only encouraged, but essential for success. Your number of scientific papers and therefore your h-index can greatly benefit by having productive collaborations.
As with all "measures", such broad, sweeping numbers are prone to manipulation and gaming. While it is important to play the game, it is also important to remember that ultimately, research is about expanding our collective knowledge and only those who truly contribute, will have lasting success./jp vestigate glassy state in cryopreserved plant material, mint shoot tips were submitted to the different stages of a frequently used cryopreservation protocol (droplet-vitrification) and evaluated for water content reduction and sucrose content, as determined by ion chromatography, frozen water fraction and glass transitions occurrence by differential scanning calorimetry, and investigated by low-temperature scanning electron microscopy, as a way to ascertain if their cellular content was vitrified. Results show how tissues at intermediate treatment steps develop ice crystals during liquid nitrogen cooling, while specimens whose treatment was completed become vitrified, with no evidence of ice formation.

Potato famine agent unmasked
Phytophthora infestans, the fungus responsible for potato late blight, triggered the Irish Great Famine in the late 1840s. A recent report published in eLife examined mitochondrial and nuclear DNA of this pathogen, isolated from historic dried leaf samples stored in herbaria across the world, by using shotgun sequencing. Potato crop failures that continued worldwide throughout the nineteenth century could be traced to a single strain, HERB-1. HERB-1 continued its global domination until the early twentieth century, when re-

SMART method for sunflower crop improvement
Sunflowers are an important source of edible vegetable oil. An international consortium of researchers from India, France and Ireland has recently described a new approach to form and screen a sunflower mutant library to target specific plant traits. Published in BMC Plant Biology, chemical mutagenesis was combined with an endonuclease based mutation detection system (known as TILLING) to screen for mutations induced in two genes associated with fatty acid biosynthesis. This methodology can rapidly generate genetic diversity within a population, allowing key genetic information associated with specific useful traits in the sunflower species to be revealed. Mutation breeding faces fewer regulatory hurdles than transgenic crop development, and thus represents a cost effective method of creating new crop cultivars./fh http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/1471-2229-13-38

Intercellular and systemic spread of RNA and RNAi in plants
Intercellular trafficking of RNA has emerged as a novel mechanism of intercellular communication in plants for development, nutrient homeostasis, gene silencing, pathogen defense, and many other physiological processes. This review discusses current progress in RNA trafficking research, as well as diverse plant regulatory mechanisms of cell-to-cell and systemic long-distance transport of mRNAs, viral RNAs, and small RNAs.

Arabidopsis thaliana as a model organism in systems biology
This review explains how systems biology is used in Arabidopsis to investigate the transcriptional networks regulating root development, the metabolic response to stress, and the genetic regulation of metabolic variability. Further investigation of plant systems will require continued improvement in metabolic technologies and novel computational methods for data visualization and modeling. Van Norman and Benfey, WIREs Syst. Biol. Med. 2009 http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/wsbm.25/full

Endosperm development: Dynamic processes and cellular innovations underlying sibling altruism
Endosperms are products of fertilization that evolved to support and nourish their genetic twin sibling embryos. These nutritional stores prompted the domestication of cereals and are the focus of ongoing efforts for crop improvement and biotechnological innovations.

Cloning Norway spruce stands -timber and energy biomass potential
In this study featured in Global Change Biology Bioenergy, the authors used ecosystem model simulations to study the timber and energy biomass potential offered by intensively managed cloned Norway spruce stands. Specifically, they analyse how the use of cloned trees compared with noncloned trees, together with thinning, nitrogen (N) fertilisation and rotation length (from 60 to 100 years), affects the annual mean production of timber and energy biomass and its economic profitability. The study concludes that the use of cloned trees, together with intensive management, could potentially be highly beneficial for the costefficient and sustainable production of timber and energy biomass in an integrated way.

Vitamin C in your daily (corn) bread
The importance of vitamin C in our diet is a well-established fact these days. A lack of vitamin C leads to many health complications, the most obvious being scurvy, which plagued long distance voyagers prior to the discovery of vitamin C and establishing a causative link between vitamin C and scurvy. While fruits and vegetables are rich sources of vitamin C, stable crops on the other hand, do not provide high levels of vitamin C. Therefore, by understanding the regulation of vitamin C synthesis and accumulation in stable crops, a significant contribution can be made in improving the nutritional status of a large portion of the population. In this latest article in Biotechnology Journal by Capell and colleagues, the author make in-roads to understanding vitamin C synthesis and accumulation in maize by examining three maize strains and one transgenic strain. The authors demonstrate significant genotype-dependent variations in vitamin C synthesis.

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