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OTHER ASSOCIATE EDITORS IN THIS AFFINITY GROUP |
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Norma Allewell |
Charles Samuel |
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George Carman |
William Smith |
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Joan Conaway |
Linda Spremulli |
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Eric Fearon |
F. Anne Stephenson |
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Gerald Hart |
James Stull |
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Vincent Hascall |
Alex Toker |
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Kenneth Neet |
Thomas Vanaman |
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Luke O’Neill |
Xiao-Fan Wang |
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| Jeffrey Pessin | |
The Journal of Biological Chemistry has maintained a long and proud tradition of publishing cutting edge papers in the field signal transduction — a legacy that dates back to the publication of Krebs and Fisher’s studies of phosphorylase kinase in 1955 and Earl Sutherland’s work on cyclic-AMP in 1958.
The Journal welcomes signaling papers that make a significant contribution to the basic understanding of signal transduction, including the function of second messengers, protein phosphorylation, ubiquitination and other modifications. Other topics of interest include genetic studies that link novel mechanisms of signaling to biological or cellular outcomes. The Journal also publishes papers on the structural biology of key signaling proteins, and publishes signaling papers relevant to both eukaryotic and prokaryotic biology.
Recently published and in-press articles of note include a Paper of the Week by Liu et al. These authors showed that the G protein-coupled receptor Lgr4 or GPR48 is critical for modulating the Wnt/β-catenin pathway so as to maintain the homeostasis and integrity of the intestinal epithelial cell barrier. Liu et al. demonstrated that mice in which the gene encoding Lgr4 was disrupted were highly susceptible to intestinal inflammation. When Wnt/β-catenin signaling was reactivated by either genetic or chemical means, the inflammation in the Lgr4 mutant mice was greatly reduced. The identification of the essential roles of Lgr4 in inflammatory bowel disease is important for the diagnosis of and development and the validation of potential drug targets for human colitis. Nicotinic acid adenine dinucleotide phosphate (NAADP) is the most potent Ca2+ releasing second messenger known. Nebel et al. show that NAADP plays a key role in beta-adrenergic stimulation of diastolic calcium transients in isolated cardiomyocytes and in arrhythmias in vivo. This is the first evidence of NAADP involvement in beta-adrenergic-stimulated cardiac arrhythmia, and poimts towards targeting this pathway to treat arrhythmia.
These are examples of some of the exciting signal transduction work published in JBC. We look forward to receiving your important signaling papers.
~ John Kyriakis, JBC Associate Editor