We would like to welcome Professor Robin Weiss to the editorial team as Reviews Editor for Retrovirology. Professor Weiss is Emeritus Professor of Viral Oncology at University College London, and is currently working on immune responses to HIV in relation to HIV vaccine development. His laboratory works on neutralizing llama antibody fragments as tools for HIV vaccine and microbicide development. In addition to this, they have adapted techniques used to study HIV neutralizing antibodies to other emerging virus infections in particular SARS, H5N1 influenza and rabies.
Robin is possibly best known for his discovery of endogenous retroviruses in chickens and for the identification of CD4 as the cell surface binding receptor for HIV. Without these important breakthrough discoveries, we
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The media is full of research about how our brains work, but how can we know whether to believe the spin that the news puts on neuroscience findings? In this guest post, we asked Professor Gina Rippon, a neuroscientist from Aston University to give us her take on how to sort the neurotrash from the neurotreasure. Her talk at the Women of the World festival at Southbank Centre explored the media coverage of research into the (lack of) differences between men and women’s brains.
The development of brain imaging techniques offers wonderful opportunities for cognitive neuroscientists to really get to grips with whatpatterns of brain activity they observe when subjects performthe behaviours they are interested in. And their findings
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One of the greatest challenges of current medicine is predicting how a patient will respond to a given drug. In an ideal world, where time, money and – most importantly – the patient’s well-being and survival are not an issue, we would simply either keep trying different treatments until hitting the jackpot, or perhaps harvest the patient’s cells and try a range of treatments in vitro. The problem is, of course, that the world is not ideal and such in vitro testing is usually not practical and, in general, especially in the case of many of the most debilitating diseases, patients often don’t have time to waste.
It is then not really surprising that many researchers have been
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BMC Anesthesiology is once again Brussels bound this year for the 34thInternational Symposium on Intensive Care and Emergency Medicine, which is taking place from 18th-21st March. In between sampling the local chocolate, waffles, mussels and beer, we will also be indulging in the very best that critical care research has to offer, and finding out what’s happening at the leading edge of the field
If you will also be attending and would be interested in speaking to us about your work, or simply discussing what’s going on in the field, then please do let our Executive Editor Tom Rowles know,and we would be happy to organise a meeting.
We look forward to seeing
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Today is the start of Brain Awareness Week, which has been led by the Dana Alliance for Brain Initiatives since 1996. Running from today until 16th March, the week seeks to raise awareness of the benefits and advancement of brain research around the world.
It’s great to see that this year, many leading research institutions and awareness organizations are hosting events aimed at students and the general public. In fact, more than 600 events are taking place worldwide, including open days at neuroscience labs and institutions, social media campaigns (#brainweek), exhibitions, workshops, lectures and much more (you can find the events in your area by visiting the calendar for the week at: http://www.dana.org/BAW/Calendar/).
To begin celebrating
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Under normal conditions skeletal muscle satellite cells (muSCs) are in a quiescent state, but when stimulated by damage, they re-enter the cell cycle to generate new fibers or self-renew to reconstitute the muSC pool. During aging muSC mediated regeneration is deeply impaired, leading to loss of skeletal muscle mass and strength (sarcopenia). Previous publications suggested that changes in the aged muscle microenvironment lead to muSC malfunction and that a younger environment can reverse this process. Three recent publications are challenging this dogma by defining a muSC intrinsic mechanism that drives geriatric muSCs into a deep and irreversible state of senescence.
The groups lead by Pura Muñoz-Cánoves, Helen M Blau and Bradley B Olwin describe in three independent publications...
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This is a guest post by Professor Phillipa Hay, Foundation Chair of Mental Health at University of Western Sydney and Editor-in-Chief of Journal of Eating Disorders. To mark International Women’s Day, she takes a look back over her career in psychiatry and publishing.
My first love has always been the humanities but I also found science stimulating. Medicine, being both an art and a science has given me the opportunity to have the best of both, as well as an extremely rewarding career as a clinician, educator and scientist.
Not surprisingly perhaps, I pursued psychiatry where an understanding of the brain, mind and behavior is essential, as well as a rich appreciation for the diversity of human life. As a teacher I
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This is a guest post by Professor Rosemary Tannock, Editor-in-Chief of Behavioral and Brain Functions. To mark International Women’s Day, she takes a look back over how her career has developed from physiotherapy to psychopathology.
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I,
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference
Robert Frost, 1915
My current career as a behavioral scientist in the field of developmental psychopathology and as an editor for a scientific journal, which I started in my mid-40’s and 60’s respectively, was unanticipated and unplanned when I underwent initial training as a physiotherapist in England.
As I criss-crossed oceans with our young children, following my husband as he pursued his scientific and medical career,
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This is a guest post by Sheila McCormick, an editor for BMC Plant Biology. To mark International Women’s Day, she takes a look back over her career in plant genetics and publishing.
When I started college at Illinois State University, I thought I might become a high school biology teacher. But as the semesters went on I started to consider going to graduate school. The professor who taught Genetics, Dr. Herman Brockman, was an inspiration – I basically fell in love with Genetics and decided to do a PhD.
I first started graduate school at Univ. Texas-Austin, intending to work on fruit fly genetics. As an undergraduate I had read a paper in the journal Genetics about the...
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Since its inception in the early 1900s International Women’s Day has witnessed lots of changes both in societal attitudes and equality. The work in creating an equal society is far from over and this ties in with this year’s theme of ‘Inspiring Change’.
In light of this theme we’ve asked some of our Editors to talk about what has inspired them. Rosemary Tannock, Editor-in-Chief of Behavioral and Brain Functions, tells us how it is never too late to make a change. She talks about the difficulties of starting a scientific career later in life, and juggling a family and research. Despite these challenges, she has contributed important work to her field, which encourages us all...
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When the three bears returned to their house in the woods, they found that their porridge had been eaten, their chairs had been sat in and ultimately that Goldilocks was fast asleep in baby bear’s bed. Unbeknownst to Goldilocks, she would have left more than a broken chair behind. Each of her interactions with the bears’ house would have transferred microbes from her to the built environment in which they lived.
We know that humans are covered in microbial life, with more bacterial cells than the cells in our own bodies. We know much less about the microbes living in the built environment – the homes we live in, our offices, farms and factories. Most humans in industrialized countries now spend
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A Guest blog by Dr Roberto C. Agis-Balboa, IBIV-Institute of Biomedical Research of Vigo (Project BIOCAPS), Spain
I had the pleasure to attend the BRAI.NS 2014 meeting celebrated on February 14-15 (2014) in Barcelona, 100 years after some of the Ramon y Cajal´s pioneering work and coinciding with the Year of the Brain in Europe. It was a tremendous success supported by Novartis. Two exceptional Co-Chairs, Prof. Xavier Montalban and Prof. Alan Thompson, welcome and help to meet the objectives and agenda to ≈500 Multiple Sclerosis (MS) experts from across nations. MS is a chronic demyelinating disease of the central nervous system categorized by loss of motor and sensory function that results from immune-mediated inflammation, demyelination and axonal loss and gliosis in the brain and
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As you know, Cell & Bioscience is the official journal of the Society for Chinese Bioscientists in America (SCBA). Currently all SCBA members receive a 15% discount when publishing in Cell & Bioscience.
Cell & Bioscience publishes research in all areas of life science research. Please see the full scope for more information.
Please contact me at jennifer.franklin@biomedcentral.com for the discount code.
Antimicrobial resistance is a global and critical issue facing the world today. Antimicrobial Resistance and Infection Control is supporting the World Health Organisation in their campaign ‘SAVE LIVES: Clean your hands’, which aims to increase global awareness of the role of hand hygiene to combat antimicrobial resistance.
The WHO awareness day is the 5th May, when two global surveys will be taking place on the following topics, which you can contribute to:
- A Global Prevalence Survey on Multidrug-Resistant Organisms (MDROs) – laboratories in healthcare facilities around the world are asked to submit data from inpatient clinical blood and urine laboratory specimens, related to five selected key multidrug-resistant organisms (MDROs).
- A Point Prevalence Global Survey on use of Surgical Antibiotic...
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Substantial progress has been made in the targeted therapy of breast cancer, with three new targeted therapies licensed for advanced breast cancer over the last two years. Targeted therapies block the growth and spread of cancer by interfering in specific biological processes responsible for cancer cell growth. Therefore targeted therapies may be more effective and less harmful to normal cells than other cancer treatments, such as traditional chemotherapy that targets all rapidly dividing cells. The most well known targeted therapy at the moment is trastuzumab (Herceptin).
A new thematic series in Breast Cancer Research brings together the translational research behind these new approaches, as well as reviewing treatments with early evidence of efficacy that are still...
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