A few weeks back this blog covered the the journals which were most important to the winners of the 2008 Nobel Prizes in Medicine which went to three important virologists, Francoise Barre-Sinoussi & Luc Montagnier for their discovery of the AIDS virus, and Harald zur Hausen for the discovery of the human papilloma viruses that cause many cases of cervical cancer.
This year’s chemistry prizes could well have qualified under the physiology and medicine category, and one of this year’s three recipients, Osamu Shimomura, emeritus professor and researcher at Boston University and Marine Biological Laboratories on Cape Cod, actually told reporters that he knew he was in the running for the prize in medicine, and was quite surprised that he got it in chemistry instead.
He has not, however, made any plans to return it and wait for next year’s in medicine instead.
The other two co-recipients Martin Chalfie of Columbia University in New York City, and Roger Tsien of U. Cal., San Diego, were just as likely candidates for the prize in medicine, because what they did is used far more by biologists and medical researchers rather than by chemists of most types.
Their collective contribution was in developing small protein tags that could be attached harmlessly to other larger proteins, by way of a tracer, albeit one with a vitally important advantage that will be discussed shortly.
This year’s chemistry Nobel Prize is an homage to an almost 300 year old field called stain technology or histochemistry, and to the 102nd anniversary of the first Nobel Prize awards in this area, given to the Italian researcher Camillo Golgi, and to his Spanish contemporary Ramon y Cajal, a medical professor who might be described as one of the first neurologists.
Whether one wishes to credit Antonie van Leeuwenhoek ( 1632-1723), a Dutch inspector of cloth weaves whose hobby was biology, who used an open single lens design that actually allowed for better color vision, or Robert Hooke (1635-1703), an English scientist of a many great talents (and one even greater enemy, Isaac Newton), who invented the tubular design overwhelmingly used today, as the true founder of biological microscopy, it can be agreed upon that they and their successors would eventually be limited by same great problem with early microscopy.
This was not any fundamental limitation on achieving greater and greater magnification (that would take another 200 years), but rather the increasing difficulty of visualizing the increasingly tiny structures within cells which appeared so translucent as to be invisible under strong microscopic magnification and intense illumination.
This “invisible man” problem was solved on a case by case basis for each particular type of specimen by the injection or immersion of the sample in chemicals or food dyes that stained the desired structures.
These might enable, for example, a cell’s nucleus to stand out, or help delineate the layers in cell walls.
Several thousands of these were developed, but at first, not many of them were able to be used across many different types of specimens.
Progress came when either a particularly versatile stain was developed or something that resisted staining finally yielded to the right combination of trial and error.
Such was the case of those early Nobel laureates Camillo Golgi, who used silver stains to discover the hitherto undetected and surprisingly complex cellular structure how called the Golgi body, and Ramon y Cajal who adapted Golgi’s silver stains, to finally delineate and trace single nerve cells in the brain, spinal cord, and limbs.
These stains, and the vast majority of others, however, actually killed the cells so the resulting image was static, and told the scientist more about altered structures rather than about altered physiology. This was still progress since many diseases involve alteration of expected cellular structure, particularly the various types of cancer.
But a tiny handful of histochemicals allowed the cell to keep on living, for at least a short time, so that a small range of normal and abnormal physiological processes could be observed.
It is in this category that the works of Shimomura, Chalfie and Tsien fall.
Using an observation in marine biology, about certain jellyfish which glowed just by being exposed to different kinds of light, they were able to:
· Find the particular proteins that did the glowing, initially a type called Green Fluorescent Protein or GFP for short.
· And then, with a coworker , Douglas C. Prasher, (who actually recently left science under dire economic circumstances with concurrent bouts of clinical depression, and now drives a shuttle van for a car dealer repair shop) found the genes that directed the production of the proteins that enabled the glowing.
· And then develop processes for incorporating the genes that made the glow proteins, into a parts of a living organism
· And developed different genetic and therefore protein peptide sequences which yielded different colors
· That glowed in ways that illuminated specific cellular functions, with different colors glowing at the same time as demonstrations of different, simultaneous activities going on in living cells.
We will now survey the journals that mattered most to these scientists. Once again we will use Thomson-Reuter’s Web of Science, realizing that other databases might provide somewhat different article counts, but that these are not likely to change significantly the trends we observe and celebrate in these authors.
Osamu Shimomura
Shimomura is the oldest of the laureates (80) and in many respects his record shows the most deference to journals that have long been of value to biochemistry and cell biology for decades, and in some cases, for almost a century. A scientist whose training included periods in both Japan and America, he shows himself to be among the most international in his choice of venues for his research.
His favorite outlet has been the British-based, 1906- established Biochemical Journal (11 papers), this is not entirely a surprise in that many East Asian scientists had at least as great a familiarity with that title as with its principal American competitor, the Journal of Biological Chemistry ( where he has never published, more surprisingly).
Other biochemistry titles include FEBS Letters from Elsevier and the Federation of European Biochemical Societies (7 papers), a post WW II journal that is intentionally international, as are most of his other choices, most particularly Elsevier’s Biochimica et Biophysica Acta the home of a paper that came out just this May, 2008.
One of his more important mini-reviews has also appeared in another Elsevier title, Trends in Biochemical Sciences.
American-based but long sharing British and Dutch Editors is Comparative Biochemistry & Physiology ( 8 papers). It is another Elsevier title in biochemistry, albeit one where the stress is as much on the role the discussed biochemical plays in the life of the organism from which it came. It makes a great deal of sense in Shimomura’s assortment, since the luminescent proteins he explored largely came from luminescent marine organisms, where their role is a matter of much speculation.
Similarly US-based, but international of authorship and often of editorship, are Analytical Biochemistry (3 papers), and Biochemical & Biophysical Research Communications (3 papers). Since the fluorescent proteins he discovered are particularly good at indicating the flow of metabolically important minerals and ions, the two papers in Cell Calcium make considerable sense, as does his paper in Protein Expression & Purification. All four titles are from Elsevier.
Photochemistry & Photobiology (4 papers) and two journals of organic chemistry that have long shown a strong interest in isolating “natural products” from biological specimens are also represented. These are Tetrahedron Letters (3 papers) and its parent journal for longer papers and reviews , Tetrahedron. All are Elsevier titles.
In something of a break from that publisher, but staying consistent with his subject matter are Wiley’s Journal of Bioluminescence & Chemiluminescence (4 papers) and Luminescence ( 1 paper). Wiley is also now the publisher of the title that contains Shimomura’s most quoted (2,904 citations) paper, which appeared in the journal now known as the Journal of Cellular Physiology (9 papers).
Shimomura might well have been less surprised at winning the chemistry award, if he perhaps reflected on the fact that he has appeared in two of the American Chemical Society’s leaders, the Journal of the American Chemical Society (2 papers), and Biochemistry (1 paper), to say nothing of the papers in three of Japan’s important chemistry journals, Bulletin of the Chemical Society of Japan (1 paper), Chemistry Letters (2 papers), Bioscience, Biotechnology & Biochemsitry (1 paper), as well as the British Royal Society of Chemistry’s Chemical Communications ( 1 paper).
Shimomura has appeared in miscellaneous journals of biology, notably his home institution’s marine biology inclined Biological Bulletin ( 3 papers), the widely-read BioScience (1 overview paper) and Biophysical Journal (1 paper).
And as with most Nobel laureates, he has a track record of publishing in the usual prestigious multiscience journals, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (8 papers), Science (2 papers) and Nature (2 papers). Not surprisingly for the cosmopolitan Shimomura, he adds the French leader, the Comptes Rendus de l’Academie des Sciences, as well.
Martin Chalfie
Martin Chalfie is someone like Ramon y Cajal in that he has shown a special interest in the nervous system, more specifically in the genetic control of its development, and someone like Camillo Golgi in that he does so by trying to understand what happens at the level of the cell.
While his most frequent publications of late have been in the usual multiscience leaders (Nature – 12 papers, Science – 6 papers, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences – 5 papers), a sampling of his other papers clearly bears this out.
The genetics/ development/ nervous system angle is demonstrated by the following.
· There are 4 papers in Neuron (Elsevier’s Cell Press), 3 papers in the Journal of Neuroscience (Society for Neuroscience) , 3 papers in Trends in Neurosciences (Elsevier) , and one paper each in the Journal of Neurochemistry (Wiley), the Journal of Neurobiology (Elsevier), Nature Neuroscience (Nature Publishing Group), and Progress in Brain Research (Elsevier).
· There are 3 papers in Genes & Development (Cold Spring Harbor Press), 3 papers in Development (UK’s not-for-profit Company of Biologists) , 2 papers in Genetics (Genetics Society of America, and single papers in the Annual Review of Genetics (the not-for-profit Annual Reviews, Inc.), Developmental Biology (Elsevier for the Society for Developmental Biology) Genome Biology (BioMed Central, the UK Open-Access publisher).
Chalfie’s cellular bona fides are attested to by:
· Five papers in the Journal of Cell Biology (Rockefeller University Press), 3 papers in Cell (Elsevier’s Cell Press), 2 papers in the Journal of Cell Science (the UK’s not-for-profit Company of Biologists), and single papers in Cell Motility and the Cytoskeleton (Wiley), the Journal of Cellular Biochemistry (Wiley), Molecular Biology of the Cell (American Society for Cell Biology), and Molecular Cell (Elsevier’s Cell Press).
In many respects, his 4 publications in Current Biology, a nominally general biology journal, albeit one with a penchant for molecular and cellular biology (it’s from Elsevier’s Cell Press after all), also attest to his strengths.
Roger Tsien
Not surprisingly many of Tsien’s papers appear in the same journals as do Chalfie’s and Shimomura’s. In fact, with over 300 articles, it’s very likely that he has published in every one of their journals at least once, and usually several times.
But his pattern is distinctive in a number of ways.
While he has more papers in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences than anyone else in this group(32), he is in many ways the poster boy for the Nature Publishing Group, in much the same way that Shimomura seemed to be the best walking advertisement for publishing with Elsevier.
Consider that he has had 23 papers in the promethean Nature, as well 4 papers each in Nature Biotechnology, and in Nature Methods; 3 papers each in Nature Cell Biology, and in Nature Reviews Molecular Cell Biology; 2 papers in Nature Protocols, as well as single papers in Nature Chemical Biology, Nature Genetics,. and Nature Neuroscience.
This is by no mean his only unique trait.
Unlike Shimomura, he is very often (22 papers) an author in the Journal of Biological Chemistry. This is exceeded only by his 24 papers in Biophysical Journal from the Biophysical Society.
Tsien has a passion for review writing, and seems on track to set a record for publishing in different editions of the Annual Reviews, Inc. series. He has a paper each in the Annual Reviews of…..Biochemistry; Biophysics & Bioengineering; Cell Biology, Neuroscience, and lastly Physiology.
Unlike both of our other Nobel authors he puts the “Physiology” into the Nobel Prize in Medicine or Physiology (once again, that’s the Nobel they did not get), for he has quite the track record in leading journals of that field, most notably, the British leader, from the Physiological Society, the Journal of Physiology – London (8 papers) as well as the US leader, the Journal of General Physiology (Rockefeller University Press for the Society for General Physiology), as well as the French society leader Journal of Physiology - Paris ( a review journal published by Elsevier), and even Acta Physiologica et Pharmacologica LatinoAmericana from Argentina.
But in many ways, his hallmark may well be his methods papers in a variety of venues, including within several of the Nature series, and of course, a paper that brings us full circle by appearing in the leading contemporary journal for that historic field that began this discussion, the Journal of Histochemistry & Cytochemistry (Histochemical Society, US).
Tony Stankus [email protected] Life Sciences Librarian & Professor
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Their combined participation was in creating small proteins labels that could be connected harmlessly to other bigger necessary proteins, by way of a tracer, at the same time one with a important benefits that will be mentioned soon.
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