oa Editorial

After serving as Editor-in-Chief of Combinatorial Chemistry & High Throughput Screening since the beginning of its publication in 1998 and overseeing the first 12 volumes, I am stepping down from this position with the beginning of CCHTS volume 13. Since I will remain on the Editorial Board, I will still be involved with CCHTS. The new Editor-in-Chief of CCHTS will be Dr. Rathnam Chaguturu who directs the High Throughput Screening Laboratories at the University of Kansas. Since the publication of manuscripts takes several months and includes peer review, revision and proof reading under the oversight of the Editor-in-Chief followed by redacting, printing and publication by the production department, most of the articles in the next several issues of CCHTS will still have been prepared under my oversight. Gradually during the year, the transition to the new Editor-in-Chief will become complete. In a 2007 editorial [1], I reviewed the early years of CCHTS and listed the top ten most cited papers from the first 10 years of publication. It seems appropriate to update the list of our ten most cited papers since there have been some changes. At the top of the list this year is a paper from the laboratory of Prof. John Pezzuto concerning the screening of natural products for antioxidants. The honor of being first is appropriate since Prof. Pezzuto was involved in the founding of CCHTS. The second and tenth most cited papers in our top-ten list concern peptides and peptide therapeutic agents. In the first of these papers, Schulz-Knappe and colleagues coined the term “peptidomics” as a corollary to proteomics, recognizing that many peptides are biochemically, pharmacologically and therapeutically important. The other paper by Lohner and Blondelle is new to this list at position 10 and describes the rational design of peptide antibiotic agents targeting bacterial membranes. The popularity of these articles is a testament to the importance of proteomics and biological therapeutic agents in biomedical research today. The articles occupying the third and fifth positions of our top-ten list review the use of multicomponent reactions such as the Ugi reaction in combinatorial synthesis. It is no surprise that Prof. Ugi is an author of one of these review articles and his former student Prof. Domling is author of the other paper. The article by Xue and Bajorath rose from fifth to fourth place and is the only article on the top ten list addressing virtual screening, which has been a popular topic for many articles published in CCHTS. The paper by Naser and Jolley reviews the use of fluorescence polarization in high-throughput screening, which has been another popular topic. At position six for the second time in a row, the paper by Masimirembwa, et al., reviews how high throughput screening is being applied to drug development with a focus on drug metabolism. This is an important step in bringing new drugs to clinical trials that can be a bottleneck and a frequent cause of lead compound failure. The articles occupying positions eight and nine are new to the top ten list this year. The article by DeSimone, et al., at position nine concerns the discovery of scaffolds known as privileged structures which usually exhibit good drug-like properties and are useful for drug discovery. Finally, the paper by Yarrow and co-workers describes the use of fluorescent probes and cell imaging to screen combinatorial libraries for physiological changes in cells. The wide range of topics represented by these articles, which cover combinatorial synthesis, virtual screening, high-throughput screening, and drug development, is faithful to the scope and purpose of CCHTS which is to publish articles on all aspects of combinatorial chemistry and high-throughput screening. When my grandfather John van Breemen emigrated from the Netherlands to the Unites States of America more than 100 years ago, he became an apprentice in a Chicago print shop. He said that he learned English by reading what he printed. Later, my grandfather ran his own print shop in which my father learned the trade, too. Although my father became a university professor, he occasionally moonlighted in a print shop and sometimes let me help. Because of my heritage in printing, I have taken great pride in my job as editor of CCHTS. During the first several years of production, much of the correspondence for CCHTS was carried out by mail, telephone and Fax. Authors had to submit their articles in both print and electronic formats. Although the peer reviewed and accepted versions of all figures and text were submitted to our printing department in electronic form, it was still necessary to supply printed copies and photo ready art in case of problems with the electronic versions. I even had to mail a color slide of the cover art for each issue to our production department. After an issue went to press, only printed reprints were available in the early years, and electronic copies were not supplied. In fact, reprints of the first two volumes are CCHTS are still not available in electronic form. Gradually, the transition to electronic media was completed, and today, no printed material or slides need to be submitted by authors. The peer review process is also carried out electronically. Today, the accepted manuscripts, figures and even the cover art are transmitted electronically to our production department. Articles are available for download via the internet as soon as the printed versions are released. By the time my successor retires from this position, the print versions of CCHTS and perhaps most scientific journals might have been discontinued. I would like to thank all the members of the Editorial Board of CCHTS, most of whom have served since the formation of this journal, for providing their time and expertise in the peer review of articles under consideration for publication. I would also like to thank Regional Editors Dr. Andy Merritt, Prof. Peter Nielsen and Prof. Ikuo Fujii for handling the peer review of countless manuscripts of the years. Of course I am most grateful for the service of our publications department whose names do not appear on the inside cover of CCHTS and whose members include the printers of CCHTS.