Welcome to the 74th Issue of BioTechniques: 40 years of publishing the latest laboratory protocols

To all our readers, we would first like to welcome you to the 74th Issue of BioTechniques and wish you a Happy New Year. This year also marks the 40th anniversary of BioTechniques and we look forward to celebrating with our readers throughout the year.

This year, we welcome three new Editorial Board Members: Elinne Becket, an Assistant Professor in biological sciences and Faculty Director of Innovation at California State University San Marcos (CA, USA); Beth Cimini, a Group Leader and Chan Zuckerburg Imaging Scientist at Broad Institute (MA, USA); and Jennifer Waters, Director of the Nikon Imaging Centre and the Cell Biology Microscopy Facility at Chapel Hill (NC, USA), two core imaging facilities.

In this Foreword, we will highlight the most cited articles and take a look at the impact of our articles on social media and various other online platforms using Altmetrics. Additionally, we will look back on our digital content highlights from 2022 and what we have in store this year.

Journal highlights: your 2023 top content wrapped

Move over Spotify wrapped, it's time for BioTechniques to look at your most-cited and impactful articles of 2022 (Table 1). Last year, it was clear that flow cytometry was the front runner of core technology at BioTechniques. A Review article takes first place in our most-cited articles list for 2022, where the author, Paul J Robinson, describes the techniques, capabilities and features as well as limitations of current flow cytometry technology and next generation instruments [1].

Our second most-cited article of 2022 is a report describing western blotting of native proteins from agarose gel. The technique detailed in the report combines contact blotting and SDS electroblotting with western blotting with activity staining and detection. The technique avoids denaturation that is characteristic of electroblotting from SDS-PAGE and pre-treatment of agarose gels with SDS [2].

Another highly cited report titled ‘Intracellular flow cytometry complements RT-qPCR detection of circulating SARS-CoV-2 variants of concern’ details the marriage of intracellular flow cytometric viral nucleocapsid staining for the characterization of SARS-CoV-2 infected cells and quantification of viral RNA using qRT-rPCR. The technique enables differentiation between early or late-phase viral replication in infected cells [3].

A report by Shaffer et al. was one of our most impactful articles this year – not only was it highly cited, but it also picked up interest on Twitter across the globe and ranked in the top content by Altmetric. In this article, the authors compared five DNA kits with a previously established, standardized protocol for extracting DNA for microbial community analysis [4].

And finally, making our most-cited list is a Benchmark, whereby the authors use agarose gel electrophoresis to assess PCR product yield. They quantified the brightness of the bands produced on the gel to obtain information about the concentration of the amplicons. The data from these techniques were compared with results from spectrophotometry, fluorometry and qPCR, finding that assessment of the relative quantity of amplicons by band brightness is precise enough even for post-PCR analysis, though this depends on concentrations of product.

Let's move our attention to Altmetric (Table 2), an alternative method of measuring the impact of articles compared to the traditional citation-based metrics of Impact Factors. Altmetrics uses qualitative data from twitter, news outlets, readers on Mendeley and citations from public policy documents to determine the impact [6].

Our top performing article, according to Altmetric, is an article titled ‘Cytotoxic T lymphocytes targeting a conserved SARS-CoV-2 spike epitope are efficient serial killers’ [7]. The authors from Cell Chorus (CA, USA) used loaded target cells expressing spike protein and beads functionalized with antibodies onto nanowell arrays. An epifluorescent microscope was used to capture images of the nanoarray and machine learning algorithms processed the images for tracking and segmentation of cells.

In another article, the authors explain how to perform a method that enables two or more gene products to be synthesized in a cell at different levels to aid in development of new therapeutics [8]. They have a lovely graphical abstract alongside their article to help with the visualization of the protocol.

The article that ranked number three by Altmetric was a Report that described a device that mimics in situ conditions for in vitro coastal microbiome studies [9]. The full details of the build, along with schematics, can be found on Protocols.io [10].

Another article highly ranked by Altmetric was a Benchmark where the authors used non-destructive extraction techniques, including in-solution hybridization capture, to retrieve DNA from preserved tissues in medical collections. The authors compared the metagenomic content of historical samples and their embedding liquid to obtain the DNA from the host and specified pathogens [11].

BioTechniques.com highlights from 2022

2022 on BioTechnqiues.com has seen a dramatic increase in our editorial output with the arrival of a new Assistant Editor, Aisha Al-Janabi, focused purely on non-commercial content and the continued expansion of BioTechniques LEARN, which we have been steadily building since its launch at the end of 2021. Furthermore, the long-awaited return to conferences has enabled us to provide a wealth of exclusive coverage from the annual meetings of the American Association for Cancer Research (8–13 April; New Orleans, LA, USA), the Federation of European Neuroscience Societies (9–13 July; Paris, France) and the Society for Neuroscience (12–16 November; San Diego, CA, USA).

Meanwhile we have continued to deliver high-value, commercially supported content in the form of our eBooks, Webinars, Spotlights and In Focus features with a new Client Projects Executive, Dorcus Mayabi, and Assistant Editor, Beatrice Bowlby, ensuring that we are well set to ensure these features remain at the high educational standards required by our audience.

BioTechniques LEARN

In the LEARN zone this year, our careers and publishing guidance section has featured a wide range of contributed articles, from preparing images for presentation at conferences and in papers to the power of comics as a tool for communicating your work. This has included features from our LEARN Mentor Panel, such as Bashiru Garba (Usmanu Danfodiyo University, Sokoto, Nigeria), who documented his transition from a veterinary practice position to working in basic research.

We have also begun to publish our technical ‘How to’ guides with our first providing a guide to quantitative proteomics, with more to follow on qualitative proteomics and flow cytometry.

Podcasts

The contributions of our LEARN Mentors expand beyond the written and include a new podcast series. Hosted by our LEARN Mentor Antentor Othrell Hinton Jr, Assistant Professor of Molecular Physiology and Biophysics at Vanderbilt University (TN, USA), STEM Tea covers the latest social, societal and scientific developments in STEM. We have released four episodes so far, discussing topics such as faith in science, the impact of incarceration on a career in science and how academia can play a vital role in the transformation of people's lives, and plan to keep publishing each month for the foreseeable future.

As we know many of our members will be strapped for time, we have also released our monthly Editor's Picks podcast in which Aisha runs through her favorite content of the month, providing an overview of each piece and highlighting the key takeaways. These short podcasts also allow us to provide a transcript with each episode, increasing their accessibility to our audience.

Content Highlights

Throughout the year these features proved particularly popular with our audience

Hate the sound of chewing? Here's why

Although this article was originally published in 2021, a new paper contradicting the original study discussed was released this year. Always wanting to provide the most up-to-date information on important topics, such as why you may want to scream at that one cousin you have to sit next to at family dinners, we updated the article with the new study and contacted both sets of authors for comment. Now providing a comprehensive overview of both sides of the debate on the mechanisms driving misophonia, this article features as our top news story of the year [12].

Most cited & most notorious: how the 2006 Alzheimer's paper potentially misled research

With reproducibility ever at the forefront of our minds here at BioTechniques, this article represented the story of the year in this space. The majority of the issues that have led to the reproducibility crisis are accidental or attributable to the reporting standards typically expected by institutions and the bias against the publication of negative data. The figure manipulations in this paper, which indicated that amyloid-beta plaques play a causative role in Alzheimer's, highlighted how even willful figure manipulation could be missed for decades and have a dramatic impact on a field.

We followed this piece with a highly popular Ask the Experts feature from three Alzheimer's researchers discussing the impact that they believed this discovery had on Alzheimer's disease research, drug development, scientific publication and the public [13].

Bioimaging & analysis

Our first Spotlight of the year covered recent developments in bioimage acquisition and analysis, with a particular focus on the role that artificial intelligence is playing in parsing information from the increasingly detailed and complex images that can be created with contemporary technologies. This Spotlight also featured an interview with our new Editorial Board member Beth Cimini (Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard; MA, USA), including her thoughts on how deep learning has impacted bioimage analysis [14].

SuperFi-Cas9 to the rescue: gene editing just got safer

As novel applications of CRISPR continue to emerge and the potential of the technology grows, one aspect of its development often goes overlooked: for this great potential to be realized in the clinic, vast strides need to be made in improving the safety and specificity of CRISPR tools. This article covered a development that redesigned Cas9 to allow it to discriminate against mismatches while retaining the accuracy and speed of its native form [15].

Talking Techniques | The epigenetic clock

Aging remains one of the most crucial research topics of our time. With people living longer and societies across the world seeing a shift in distribution towards older populations, the question of how to prolong quality of life into old age has never been more important. This podcast on the epigenetic clock revealed the powerful insights that epigenetics can offer into aging, including how behaviors and environment impact aging, how to age healthily and how to reverse your epigenetic clock [16].

Conclusion

We would like to thank our valued Editorial Board members, contributing authors, peer reviewers and readers for the continued support and collaboration as we publish the latest cutting-edge laboratory methodologies and techniques. We thoroughly look forward to working with you all over the next year and to see BioTechniques continue to grow and serve the research community.

There are many opportunities to be featured both in the journal and on the website, whether in a written interview or opinion piece, a podcast or video, so please get in touch with Managing Editor Ebony Torrington (etorrington@biotechniques.com) to find out more.