The first issue of the HFSP Journal is now available

HFSP Publishing is proud to announce the publication of the first issue of the HFSP Journal, Frontiers of Interdisciplinary Research in the Life Sciences which is available online free of charge at http://scitation.aip.org/dbt/dbt.jsp"KEY=HFSPJX&Volume=LASTVOL&Issue=LASTISS

The HFSP Journal is a new journal which aims to foster communication between scientists publishing high quality, innovative interdisciplinary research at the interface between biology and the physical sciences.

The first issue features:

• An Editorial from the Editor-in-Chief Arturo Falaschi from the International Centre for Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology in Trieste and the Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa in Italy which discusses the new frontiers of research in the life sciences, many of which require approaches from other scientific disciplines.

• An Editorial from the President of HFSP Publishing, Mark Bisby from Ottawa, Canada which explains that the HFSP Journal aims to further the goals of the Human Frontier Science Program to promote innovative basic research at the interface between the life sciences and the physical sciences.

• A Commentary from Paul De Koninck from the Centre de Recherche Université Laval Robert Giffard, Université Laval, Québec, in Canada and his colleagues which discusses a recent study of synaptic signaling and remodeling by quantum dot imaging from Daniel Choquet’s group.

• A Commentary from Jonathon Howard and Iva Tolic-Norrelykke from the Max Planck Institute for Cell Biology and Genetics in Dresden, Germany which discusses two recent articles from François Nédélec’s group which address the issue of how cortex-microtubule interactions position the mitotic spindle by a combination of experimental and theoretical approaches.

• A Perspective from pioneers in the fields of single molecule imaging and manipulation of single molecules, Yoshiharu Ishii and Toshio Yanagida from the Graduate School of Frontier Biosciences at the University of Osaka in Japan, which reviews the insight such approaches have provided into the visualization of the dynamic operations of molecular motors, enzymatic reactions, structural dynamics of biomolecules, and cell signaling processes.

• A Perspective from Kenji Doya from the Neural Computational Unit at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology in, Japan which reviews basic the theoretical framework of reinforcement learning which was developed in the artificial intelligence community and discusses its recent and future contributions toward the understanding of animal behaviors and human decision making.

• An Article from the Wiltschko lab at J. W. Goethe-University in Frankfurt, Germany and Thorsten Ritz at the Department of Physics and Astronomy of the University of California in, Irvine, California reporting on an interdisciplinary study combines behavioral zoology neurobiology and biophysics to further the current level of understanding of magnetoreception and bird migration.

• An Article by Ajay and Bhalla from the National Centre for Biological Sciences at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research in Bangalore, India who combined experiments and models to shed light onto the mechanisms by which ERKII signaling spreads long distances in apical dendrites of stimulated hippocampal pyramidal neurons.

• Two Articles by Erich Bornberg-Bauer at the Institute for Evolution and Biodiversity, School of Biological Sciences, University of Münster, Germany and his coworkers and by Dan Tawfik and colleagues from the Department of Biological Chemistry at the Weizmann Institute of Science in, Rehovot, Israel which together report on a multidisciplinary study combining theory, computational and experimental work that offers an intriguing new perspective on the evolution of new functions. The study by Bornberg-Bauer and colleagues addresses the biophysical basis of how mutational paths that seem to be neutral with respect to the dominant phenotype under selection can allow adaptive evolution by selecting a latent phenotype. The article by Tawfik et al. reports on an experimental analysis of protein evolution and provides the first direct evidence of the existence of latent evolution.

The Editorial Board of the HFSP Journal represents 5 distinguished scientists from different disciplines but each with a strong focus on living systems:-

• Arturo Falaschi (International Centre for Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology, Trieste and Scuola Normale Superiore of Pisa, Italy).
• Marcelo Magnasco (Department of Physics, Rockefeller University),
• Peter Seeberger (Department of Chemistry, ETH Zurich, Switzerland),
• Dan Kiehart (Department of Biology, Duke University) and
• Mitsuo Kawato (ATR Computational Neuroscience Laboratories, Kyoto University, Japan)

The HFSP Journal offers its authors the option to pay a fee to make their research articles Open Access immediately upon publication. For other articles, access is limited to subscribers for the first 6 months after publication, and access will be free thereafter. The HFSP Journal is be published online and in print.

The HFSP Journal is operated by HFSP Publishing the not-for-profit publisher of the leading international funding agency the Human Frontier Science Program Organization (HFSPO). This international funding agency has been supporting innovative research at the frontier of biology since its establishment in 1989.