Open questions in biology - a tenth anniversary series

Abstract

In November of this year, it will be ten years since BMC Biology published its first research paper. We shall be marking this anniversary year in April with a special collection of articles reflecting some of our most notable publications of the decade, and a very special celebration at the FASEB meeting in Boston in April - more news on that soon. But meanwhile, and throughout the year, we shall be publishing short contributions from our Editorial Board on those open questions they find most pressing, tantalizing, or just interesting, in their fields, both to reflect the particular interests of a journal with a very broadly defined scope, and to provide some very brief and lively reading. Some members of our Editorial Board have contributed just a paragraph or two, and these contributions will be published together in small collections: our inaugural collection [1] contains a challenge from Stephen Benkovic to researchers engaged in the high-throughput proteomic identification of protein-protein interactions; a question from Julie Theriot on the motor proteins of bacteria; and a proposal from Dagmar Ringe for 21st-century evolutionary biology. Others have sent slightly longer contributions, of which we publish two this month: Gillian Griffiths on nagging puzzles in immunology, all with membrane transport at their heart [2]; and Frank Uhlmann on unanswered questions in chromosome packaging [3], not the least of which is the modus operandi of the structural maintenance of chromosomes (SMC) molecules, whose hinged coil-coil structure and ATPase activity must be telling us something about how they function in chromosome condensation (and sister chromatid cohesion and DNA repair), though it remains tantalizingly unclear exactly what.