Cell Stress and Chaperones

Edited by:
  • Lawrence E. Hightower
Churchill Livingstone. 4/yr.£145, $199 (institutional); £95, $140 (personal)

The idea of a journal combining the disciplines of cell stress and molecular chaperones is a strong one in principle. The unifying theme of this field is that the molecular basis of the cellular response to stress (whether in the form of heat, toxic chemicals or physical damage) is to be found in the large array of protein families known as molecular chaperones.

These proteins are helpers and scavengers that deal with proteins that are unfolded, denatured or in transit, in both stressed and unstressed cells, and the journal's subject area ranges from the cell biology of the stress response to the mechanisms by which molecular chaperones work.

At present, Cell Stress and Chaperones is publishing a modest number of original reports: a mere drop in the recent flood of papers in this area, often in the highestranking journals. To justify its existence, the journal also needs to provide more general information of interest to the disparate disciplines in the field. All the obvious ideas are there: meeting reports, mini-reviews, announcements, lists of recent papers, and a Web page. But the quality is mixed.

The mini-reviews are well written and of broad interest. The meeting reviews are excellent, but need to be more timely in this fast-moving field: a review of a May meeting appearing the following March is not particularly useful. The advance publicity for meetings is incomplete, and the list of general references is unstructured and indigestible. The Web page too is a disappointment, lacking even a link to the Chaperonin Home Page, a site that provides an object lesson in what could have been achieved.

Our overall verdict? Nice idea, but the excellent editorial board needs to persuade authors to submit more major papers and to commission more general review articles, and the publishers need to put themselves under a bit more stress to get it right.