PROTEOMICS: The first 15 years

Achim Kraus and Mike Dunn at the HUPO Congress 2014 in Madrid In 1975 Pat O’Farrell published his seminal paper describing the high-resolution twodimensional separation of more than 1000 proteins from Escherichia coli by two-dimensional electrophoresis. This elegant and powerful technique, which came to be known as 2D-PAGE or 2DE, soon became a major tool for those studying protein expression in normal and diseased tissues and cells. This resulted in a large number of publications, many of which were published in the journal ELECTROPHORESIS, founded in 1980 by Bertold Radola. Michael (Mike) Dunn, who at that time was using 2DE in his research into neuromuscular diseases, was invited to join the Editorial Board of ELECTROPHORESIS in 1982, and became an Associate Editor with responsibility for handling papers submitted in the area of 2DE and protein expression analysis in 1985. Hans-Joachim (Achim) Kraus joined the Editorial team of ELECTROPHORESIS as Managing Editor in 1992. The first Siena Meeting was held in September 1994 and titled “2D Electrophoresis: From Protein Maps to Genomes”. This meeting marked a major milestone because it was here that Marc Wilkins introduced the concept of the “proteome”, resulting in the birth of the field of “proteomics”. The term proteome was used for the first time in a paper by Marc Wilkins and his colleagues from Sydney and published in ELECTROPHORESIS in 1995. In the same year the Proceedings of the first Siena Meeting were published in ELECTROPHORESIS, and by 1997 four Special Issues of the journal on proteomics topics had appeared. By 2000 papers in the area of proteomics accounted for some 1500 printed pages of Volume 21 of ELECTROPHORESIS. It was clear that a new journal dealing exclusively with this rapidly developing field was urgently required. It was against this background that Wiley, following discussions with Bertold Radola, agreed to launch the journal PROTEOMICS in January 2001, with Mike Dunn as Editor-in-Chief and Achim Kraus as Managing Editor at Wiley-VCH (Weinheim). This decision was very well received with a very positive response to letters of invitation to leading scientists in the field to become Senior Editors or to join the Editorial Board of the journal. The timing of the launch of PROTEOMICS was perfect, as it was the first journal worldwide devoted this topic. The following year saw the launch of Molecular and Cellular Proteomics by ASBMB and the Journal of Proteome Research by ACS. Over the last 15 years these three leading journals in the field of proteomics have continued to grow and prosper, and several additional journals have been successfully launched in the area. Today proteomics technologies and approaches are used in most areas of research in the biosciences, including microbiology, cell biology, plant science, biomedicine and animal science. The response of researchers in the field was immediate, such that the 12 issues of PROTEOMICS published annually in 2001 rose to 15 in 2005 and reached 24 issues in 2006. The 594 articles published that year accounted for nearly 6500 printed pages of Volume 6. PROTEOMICS was added to the MEDLINE/Pubmed database in 2002, and the journal’s first Impact factor was 4.007, rising to 6.088 in 2005. The journal was also featured as Journal of the Month by ISI InCites in September 2004. At that time, ISI noted “PROTEOMICS is having a growing influence in the field of Molecular Biology & Genetics. The journal’s current record in this field includes 649 highly cited papers with a total of 3469 cites to date.” By 2006 it was clear that the very large number of papers being submitted annually to PROTEOMICS represented a timely opportunity to launch a second journal dealing with a specific area of proteomic research. Following discussions with Carol Bacchus, Editorial Director of Life Sciences at Wiley-VCH (Weinheim) it was decided to launch the new journal PROTEOMICS – Clinical Applications (PCA) in January 2007, with Mike Dunn as Editorin-Chief and Achim Kraus as Managing Editor. Published in 12 issues annually, PCA has developed into a key source of information in the field of applying proteomics to the study