In the ERA of science communication, Why you need Twitter, Professional Blog and ImpactStory?

Where is the information? Where are the scientifically relevant results? Where are the good ideas? Are these things (only) in journals? I usually prefer to write about bioinformatics and how we should include, annotate and cite our bioinformatics tools inside research papers (The importance of Package Repositories for Science and Research, The problem of in-house tools); but this post represents my take on the future of scientific publications and their dissemination based on the manuscript “Beyond the paper” (1).

In the not too distant future, today’s science journals will be replaced by a set of decentralized, interoperable services that are built on a core infrastructure of open data and evolving standards — like the Internet itself. What the journal did in the past for a single article, the social media and internet resources are doing for the entire scholarly output. We are now immersed in a transition to another science communication system— one that will tap on Web technology to significantly improves dissemination. I prefer to represent the future of science communication by a block diagram where the four main components: (i) Data, (ii) Publications, (iii) Dissemination and (iv) Certification/Reward are completely interconnected:

Celebrating Ten Years of Mann and Aebersold’s “Mass spectrometry-based proteomics” review.

In 2003 Mann & Aebersold reviewed on the pages of Nature the challenges and perspectives of the then-nascent field of MS-based proteomics. Mass spectrometry (MS) has since entrenched itself as the method of choice for analyzing complex protein samples, and MS-based proteomics has become an indispensable technology for interpreting genomic data and performing protein analyses (primary sequence, post-translational modifications (PTMs) or protein–protein interactions).

" The ability of mass spectrometry to identify and, increasingly, to precisely quantify thousands of proteins from complex samples can be expected to impact broadly on biology and medicine."

The manuscript by Mann & Aebersold is one of the most cited manuscripts in the field of MS proteomics, For this reason is one of the “core papers” in the field of proteomics and computational proteomics, outlining most of the basic concepts required to understand the fundamentals of this discipline.

Ten years after its publication the main workflow described in the manuscript do not change dramatically. In this period major advances are related to the development of the Thermo’s Orbitrap Mass Spectrometer (Velos, LTQ, Exactive, etc) and new fragmentations types (ETD, HCD). Separation techniques (electrophoretic and chromatographic) were explored extensively in these ten years. Aebersold pioneered in 2005 the use of OFFGEL electrophoresis and electrophoresis fragmentation at peptide level (Heller 2005) and Mann’s group developed the FASP method for sample preparation before protein digestion (Wiśniewski JR et al 2009),both of which have contributed significantly to the dramatic increase in the number of identified proteins characterizing today’s proteomic projects. Surprisingly, the development of electrophoretic methods in the last 3 years looks like a “passed-on topic”. In ten years we moved from identifying at most 500 species in complex samples to identifying 60% of the human proteome.