Emerging Investigators 2009

Welcome to the Molecular BioSystems 2009 Emerging Investigators issue devoted to outstanding young scientists at the chemical- and systems-biology interfaces. This is the second issue of its kind to be published in Molecular BioSystems. The first Emerging Investigators issue was published in June last year and it was so successful that it was decided to publish such an issue annually.

As with last year’s issue, members of the Editorial and Advisory Boards were asked to suggest the names of high-quality up and coming researchers in the field. These individuals were then invited to submit some of their recent work for this issue. All of the papers were subjected to full peer review. The end result is an issue of Molecular BioSystems including over 20 full research papers and communications that reflect the broad range of biological problems being tackled with modern chemistry, genomics and proteomics technologies.

These include studies of protein–protein and protein–nucleic acids interactions; the perturbation of biological systems with small molecules, including a quantitative high-throughput screen for modulators of IL-6 signalling; natural product studies, including isoprenoid profiling; potential inhibitors of microbial pathogens and metabolic profiling; biosensors; aspects of synthetic biology including the enhancement of directly evolved unnatural amino acid synthetases; use of fluorescent probes and more.

I hope you enjoy this second Emerging Investigators issue in Molecular BioSystems. I would like to congratulate all the principal authors and their research teams for the exciting research published in this issue and to wish them every success in their future research.

Best regards,

Tom Kodadek

Chair, Molecular BioSystems Editorial Board

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