Welcome to the final edition of the Biochemist for 2024. This is focussed on the topic of Unanswered Questions. As a lab-based scientist, I have spent the best part of forty years (how did that happen?) addressing what to me seem to have been unanswered questions. I will not be alone, and all of you who have taken this route will have been working towards answering your own questions and probably like me will have met with differing levels of success. Our knowledge of things scientific has been built on the ability of the wider community to make advances ranging from the iterative to the transformational and it is this process that keeps expanding our knowledge.
For this edition of the magazine, we sought contributions from our readership on what they considered to be important questions that still need answers. These are not the only unresolved questions but represent several important topics that we hope will be of general interest to our readership.
Firstly, Rao and Senapati discuss the subject of archaea, the so-called third domain of life only discovered within the last 50 years. They discuss the state of knowledge of the subject and pose the question, why archaea have not been associated with significant disease: are they non-pathogenic or understudied?
Iglesias, Garcia-Pardo and Ventura introduce us to amyloids. Most people will know about amyloids due to their involvement as the driver of pathogenesis in multiple human neuronal diseases. Amyloids are a form of protein aggregates, the best known of which are found in range of neurodegenerative conditions including Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. But must they always be toxic? The cellular homeostatic machinery largely works to prevent the formation of protein aggregates but as the article describes, there are several situations in which amyloids exhibit functionally important roles across phylogeny.
The article by Orna Issler, addresses the question of functional roles of non-coding RNAs in the regulation of brain function and depression. The burden of mental health and depression is increasingly recognized as a major problem in society, and it is also recognized that there is a significant genetic component to depression. The article highlights gaps in knowledge around non-coding RNA and brain function. It further shows us that there are many unanswered questions that need to be resolved before non-coding RNAs can be used as diagnostic tools or therapeutic targets.
The final two contributions are related to the subject of aging, an area that is personally of concern to me, but is of course of significant interest to all of us as the population ages. Much effort is being made to understand processes that govern healthy aging. Prasad Kasturi outlines the role of the proteostasis network in maintaining cellular health. Proteostasis is the complex network of pathways that maintains the balance of proteins in cells to enable them to support normal activities. It is well recognized that proteostasis is impaired during aging and this leads to homeostatic dysregulation. The article raises the question whether the proteostasis network can be targeted to enable the aging process to be delayed so as to extend health lifespan. On a more personal level, we also publish an interview with Joris Deelen, a mid-career aging researcher from Germany, who outlines how his work is focused on the genetics of longevity and is trying to identify genetic variations that may protect people from age-related disease. He also highlights how we still need to learn much about how the processes identified as contributing to the control of lifespan in experimental studies actually contribute to human aging.
This issue also contains a further three entries from the Biochemical Society’s Science Communication prize that again highlights the diversity of our membership as well as showcasing the communication and writing skills of the competition entrants. We also publish another Beginner’s Guide article on the design of experiments. I hope that these articles go on to be popular with the community as previous guides we have published.
This edition represents the final one of my first year in post and I hope that you enjoy reading it. We recently held our Editorial Board meeting where we picked out the topics for the next year and I am very much looking forward to helping these through to publication in 2025. If you feel that you would like to contribute to the magazine over the next year, then please feel free to contact me.
