Shining cats and the tiny stem cells

Abstract

THIS year’s Nobel prize in chemistry, awarded for the discovery and scientific application of Aequorea victoria fluorescent proteins, also sheds its light on flow cytometry. Flow and image cytometry not only apply fluorescent-protein technology to a myriad of questions but also use one key technology to characterize and purify cells that were transfected with GFP (read more in this month’s Communication by Teodori et al.). Although the majority of the basic works on fluorescent proteins were reported in other journals we have the privilege to publish one of the first reports on the newly discovered very small embryonic-like stem cells (VSELs) by Zuba-Surma et al. (1). This field may prove the next big thing in stem cell research and regenerative medicine. The group reported on the existence of VSELs for the first time only 2 years ago (2). This publication was cited so far over 60 times. Their work in this issue reports on the existence of VSELs in virtually all adult organs of the mouse. Based on the work presented here, the first author was unanimously awarded the ISAC President’s Award of Excellence at the ISAC XXIV Congress in Budapest (May 2008). We honor and highlight her achievements in the present issue by publishing it as a Rapid Publication. This is a rare privilege as it requires a very short reviewing time of 1 week by the reviewers, immediate acceptance or very minor revision and warrants publication in the next print issue. Since 2007 the new Cytometry Part A has awarded only four papers with a Rapid Publication designation (3–6). Many of them are already highly recognized and cited. Let us see how the small stem cells become big. In addition, this publication is a taste of what is to come in our special issue on stem cells in January 2009. This issue will cover different aspects of neuronal, hematopoietic, corneal, endothelial, and of course very small stem cells. The papers focus on characterization, isolation, enrichment and are authored by the leaders in the field. The second highlight of this issue is the manuscript by Pedreira et al. (7). This paper follows the previous publication of the group (8) wherein they showed how to combine different list mode data sets on immunophenotyping to generate hierarchically higher ranking virtual polychromatic flow cytometry. The end of the year is also the time to take a glance back. Looking back on how Cytometry Part A has developed since 2007 until today is encouraging. I would like to express here my gratitude toward all Associate Editors, the Editorial Board members, and the Advisory Board. My particular thanks go to all the reviewers who remain (obviously) unknown. We will acknowledge their work by publishing the list of reviewers in an upcoming issue of the Journal. Editorial board members and reviewers performed excellent and high-quality scientific work to maintain the high standards of the journal. Their workload steadily increases as the number of submitted manuscripts increases—almost 10% over last year—with an attendant increase in recognition of Cytometry Part A by our community. The consequence is, however, that the rejection rate had to go up as the number of print pages is limited, i.e. the number of published manuscripts, remains relatively constant. Consequently, the rejection rate for original submissions including Technical Notes and Brief Reports had to increase from 30% in 2006 to over 44%. This increase was paralleled by reducing the manuscript transit time. I am very pleased to inform you that for 2 years we have maintained the time from submission to first decision to less than 30 days. For this achievement I wish to thank the Associate Editors and the colleagues fromWiley-Blackwell in Hoboken, NJ, for their continuous hard work. The increased manuscript submission rate is in particular due to more imaging, image analysis, and image cytometry articles on these topics. In 2003–2005 more than 60% of our