Our new look at biology

‘It's the Biology’, can and should be said to be the central focus of our journal. Our Integrative Biology masthead declares us to be about ‘Interdisciplinary approaches for molecular and cellular life sciences’, and enthusiastically so. Our goal is to serve as a unique catalyst for progress in biology, certainly in terms of fundamental molecular and cellular mechanisms, by bringing new ideas to bear on the questions being addressed – and especially by bringing new ideas to bear on what questions are posed. We're excited about the promise of interdisciplinary thinking in molecular/cellular life science, along with the well-established tradition of new methods. We place strong emphasis on multi-variate “systems analysis” at both the molecular and cellular levels, as well as on connecting molecular and cellular mechanisms to higher-level tissue physiology for understanding and rational manipulation of what is being termed “emergent behavior” from interactions among diverse cell types. Intimate integration of quantitative experimental and computational modeling approaches is, in our view, an especially powerful way forward for addressing these kinds of complex problems. We are convinced that the field of biology needs our journal to help show the way in proving the promise of a ‘New Look at Biology’, for in our view there is no other that emphasizes our intense spotlight on new ideas coming from other disciplines to ask new questions about how complex molecular and cellular systems operate.

How are we doing in practice? My Editorial Board colleagues and I are very gratified by the continuing increase in article submissions from top laboratories around the world across a wonderfully diverse spectrum of disciplinary backgrounds and interdisciplinary melds. This increase has induced us to expand our cohort of superb Associate Editors, now adding Paul Matsudaira (National University of Singapore) and Vassily Hatzimanikatis (École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne) to our previous stalwarts Mary Helen Barcellos-Hoff (New York University), David Beebe (University of Wisconsin-Madison), and John McCarthy (University of Warwick). We can accordingly now effectively handle an even greater volume of submissions over an even wider range of expertise – microbial as well as mammalian biology in one dimension, and measurement technology and computational modeling in another, as always in concert with in-depth state-of-the-art bioscience. This allows us to hold the quality bar and the potential for impact on advancing our understanding of complex molecular and cellular systems at the highest level.

How will we find that impact? There are, of course, familiar quantitative metrics – by which we are doing perhaps surprisingly well already in our nascent stage, with our very first official impact factor being 4.44 as reported in 2012, after our initial 4 years of existence. This is significantly above many field-specific molecular, cell, and tissue biology journals, and we aspire to publish innovative work that advances the topics of focus in these fields but in a manner that synergistically brings them together. Impact factor metrics are, of course, fairly short-term in nature, and tend to reflect the size of a community following a recognized perspective and using appreciated approaches. For now, I consider an especially attractive measure to be where we are in laboratory and conference conversations among PIs and students/postdocs: on what they have read recently that's unusually thought-provoking; or where they might submit a contribution that is unconventional in one way or another; or likely to “fall through the cracks” in classical molecular/cell biology journals, but nonetheless keenly striving above all to learn something important about a biological problem from that new look. Integrative Biology is certainly in these conversations of my own and those of my Editorial Board colleagues, and I look forward to more and more of you all joining us in 2013. Along with our wide-ranging contributed papers we have some exciting thematic special issues. This first issue of 2013 is a themed issue on “Cancer Nanotechnology” (see the Editorial in this issue, DOI: 10.1039/C2IB90050E). There are another two in the pipeline, the first will be an issue dealing with “Organs on Chips” which will be jointly published in association with the Lab on a Chip journal and we are at the planning stages for a second issue on the subject of “Synthetic Biology” – so stay tuned!

Finally, I offer my sincere thanks to all our authors and reviewers for their contributions to the journal in helping to build our reputation for high quality, interdisciplinary science, we wish you all the best of the season.

Douglas A. Lauffenburger

Ford Professor of Bioengineering

Chair, Integrative Biology Editorial Board

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