March 5, 2014 — In the cover story of the March 2014 issue, contributor Diedre Ribbens explores the causes of seasonal affective disorder, or the “winter blues.” Also, we offer two Q&As by science writer Rajendrani Mukhopadhyay: one with John Denu, a new associate editor at the Journal of Biological Chemistry, and one with Jonathan Weissman, the plenary lecturer for the ASBMB annual meeting next month in San Diego. In his “President’s Message,” Jeremy Berg analyzes the effects of the across-the-board federal budget cuts on investigators seeking R-series grants from the National Institutes of Health. And, on a related note, ASBMB’s public affairs director, Benjamin Corb, writes about why it’s so hard to secure increased research-funding appropriations even when politicians throughout the political spectrum agree on science’s value to the nation and humanity. Finally, we begin our coverage of the ASBMB annual award winners. We will feature the remaining winners next month. Read the March issue.

March 10, 2014 — In the last of our four-part podcast series on the best articles of 2013 in the The Journal of Biological Chemistry, we hear about the debate surrounding α-synuclein, which plays a critical role in Parkinson’s disease. Is it an unfolded monomer? Is it a helically-folded tetramer? Paul Fraser, a professor of medical biophysics at the University of Toronto and a JBC associate editor, speaks with Dennis Selkoe, a professor of neurological diseases at Harvard Institutes of Medicine, and Ulf Dettmer, a research fellow in neurology also at Harvard. Selkoe and Dettmer are co-authors of JBC’s best article of 2013 in the Affinity category of Cell Biology. It is titled, “In Vivo Cross-linking Reveals Principally Oligomeric Forms of α-Synuclein and β-Synuclein in Neurons and Non-neural Cells,” and it was published in March. The paper details a new method for cross-linking α-synuclein in living cells that reveals a form consistent with a tetramer. In this conversation, we hear about the prior research leading to this article and what to look forward to as the debate continues.
 

Click here to read a transcript of this podcast interview.
 

March 3, 2014 — In Part Three of our series of the best articles of 2013 in the The Journal of Biological Chemistry, we hear a conversation between Alex Toker, a professor in the Department of Pathology at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, and Ron Bose, a medical oncologist and assistant professor in the Division of Biological and Biomedical Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis. Bose is the corresponding author of the paper “Carboxyl Group Footprinting Mass Spectrometry and Molecular Dynamics Identify Key Interactions in the HER2-HER3 Receptor Tyrosine Kinase Interface.” This paper was named the JBC’s Best Article of 2013 in the category of Signal Transduction. The paper provides the first structural characterization of HER2-HER3 heterodimers, which are part of the receptor family that is used in the development of targeted cancer therapies. Here, Bose talks about his more than 10 years of research in the study of tyrosine kinases. He also talks about where the research is going, the development of innovation where mass spectrometry is limited in the study of protein complexes that can’t be crystalized, and the power of interdisciplinary studies for graduate students in science.
 

Click here to read a transcript of this podcast interview.