Awards and changes at the Journal of Plant Research

Abstract

I am very pleased to announce that the paper contributed by Dr. Mari Murai-Hatano and Dr. Tsuneo Kuwagata (MuraiHatano and Kuwagata 2007) won the JPR Best Paper Award 2008. This award-winning work was selected from all the original papers published in the Journal of Plant Research in 2007, by a vote of the editorial board members according to the JPR Awards Selection Procedure. In this study, the authors, Dr. Murai-Hatano and Dr. Kuwagata, investigated the osmotic water permeability of both plasma membrane (Pf1) and vacuolar membrane (Pf2), as well as the bulk osmotic water permeability of a protoplast [Pf(bulk)] isolated from radish roots. They successfully determined these values by measuring the swelling/shrinking rate of protoplasts and isolated vacuoles under hypoor hypertonic conditions. This experimental approach is based on the ‘‘three-compartment model,’’ which describes the theoretical relationship among Pf1, Pf2, and Pf(bulk) (Kuwagata and Murai-Hatano 2007). By using this novel experimental approach based on a robust theoretical background, the authors found high osmotic water permeability of more than 500 lm s both in the plasma membrane and vacuolar membrane in radish root cells. These results are surprising because it is widely accepted that the activity of aquaporins in plants is much higher in the vacuolar membrane compared with that in the plasma membrane. This new finding extends our knowledge about the water relation of plants and significantly contributes to our understanding of plant growth and function. On a different note, the winner of the Most-Cited Paper Award was to have been selected from all the papers published in 2005 by reference to the ISI database. It is unfortunate that no paper won the award for this year, because no paper published in 2005 was cited as frequently as those published in 2004 or in 2006. This does not mean a decreasing trend in citation of JPR. Despite lower levels of citation in 2005 papers, the ISI impact factor as well as total citation of JPR papers has been steadily increasing since 2006, with the score for 2007 being 1.415.