Note from the Research Network of Computational and Structural Biotechnology (RNCSB)

1 Gianni Panagiotou is editor-in-chief of Computational and Structural Biotechnology Journal. RNCSB and Elsevier are delighted to announce their collaboration on the development and promotion of Computational and Structural Biotechnology Journal (CSBJ), an open-access and online-only journal that was launched 2 years ago. During that period CSBJ published more than 130 articles relevant to both human therapeutic discovery and commercialization groups, as well as the industrial biotechnology sector — the two largest and fastest growing fields of innovation and research. In the first 9 volumes of the journal the focus was on topics such as microbial informatics, computational chemistry & drug discovery, genomics, proteomics, metabolomics as well as enzymology, structure and function of proteins, nucleic acids and other macromolecules. Whether we consider the biopharmaceutical industry, focused on a myriad of therapeutic areas, or the industrial biotechnology sector, focused on development and implementation of bioprocesses for production of value-added products, it is very clear that the next 10 years of research will be dominated by interfaces – in this particular case – the interface between computational biology and model development, and cell biology with a heavy focus on genomics. Journals, conferences, and forums that continue to naturally integrate these disciplines and offer scientists, engineers, and technologists an opportunity to learn, critique, observe, peer-review and contribute within this framework of natural integrationwill be preferred.Why? In nearly all cases, the impact of development efforts and research trying to focus deeply in areas of deep sequencing, genomics, transcriptomics, proteomics, metabolomics, quantitative physiological characterization of bioprocesses, modeling and simulations of microbial metabolism, and so forth and so on, was minimal until the work was united and integrated with other efforts. In more simple terms, we have recognized that research teams and efforts that approach, from the very first experimental design, the challenge holistically will yield processes, understanding, identification of new pathways and proteins, or construction and selection of new strains and cell types, that meet the research objective. There is simply no other way to work. We anticipate that the CSBJ based on content, invited authors, editors, and projected future focus would be a preferred forum for the types of groups and efforts I'm describing above, where the natural integration of work streams in both the computational and -omics space is reflective of how cutting edge institutions are organized. Clearly, the CSBJ is not the first journal to offer the suggestion that computational biology should be closely integrated with structural biology — the difference however is that the journal has started with that intention and advocates that as a platform for research. Many of the competing journals in the space are generally weighted towards either computation or experimentation. The CSBJ has the opportunity to not only offer equal weighting but focus on the tremendous innovations