Journal of Biomolecular Screening: The Official Journal of the Society for Biomolecular Screening

Edited by:
  • Mark Crawford
Liebert. 4/yr. USA $185, elsewhere $236 (institutional); USA $127, elsewhere $146 (personal)
Credit: MARK DOBSON

In response to mounting competitive pressure, the pharmaceutical, agricultural and biotechnology industries have made changes in their discovery programmes to identify lead candidate molecules more quickly and to reduce development failures and costs. The growth in the number and variety of assays has placed renewed emphasis on high-throughput screening as a source of quality drug candidates. Screening countless natural product extracts and chemical libraries has long been a workhorse of drug discovery, so recent advances in chemistry, biology, automation and information management have created a need for a new forum for the exchange of ideas.

The Society of Biomolecular Screening meets this multidisciplinary need. As its house organ, Journal of Biomolecular Screening includes society updates and provides a place for working groups to promote standards.

Take microtitre trays for automated handling. The typical biochemist may think that all trays are interchangeable and perhaps somewhat boring, but the automation engineer knows all too well that small variations in the dimensions of commercial microtitre plates represent an immense range for a robotic gripper system.

Also published in each issue are three to five original articles covering a wide range of topics of interest to the screening industry. Well written and attractively illustrated, they describe assay technology, combinatorial chemistry techniques and automation. A stimulating feature is a ‘point-counterpoint’ debate that aims to reach a compromise between pragmatic demands and ideal goals in screening. I found the technical reports describing product applications informative, considering the importance of instrumentation in this field.

The journal should provide a useful forum for discussion of assay technologies, automation strategies and their integration into screening programmes.