Microbial Genomics: One-Year Anniversary!

July marked the one-year anniversary of the Society’s newest open access journal, Microbial Genomics (MGen). We recap on the journal’s extraordinary first year and meet the journal’s Senior Editors to find out what achievement they are most proud of and what papers they hope to see published in the journal in the future.

The past year has seen a wave of change across the Society’s journal publishing department, and paving the way in innovation is the Society’s open access and open data journal Microbial Genomics (MGen), which aims to champion the discoverability and accessibility of open research data. In support of this mission, four MGen Editors joined a panel discussion on Open Data at the Society’s Annual Conference to discuss why it’s important to share datasets in real-time and connect on a wider scale to target outbreaks; the differences in open data needs for academics and public health clinicians; and being open about science and the importance of metadata.

Another exciting achievement for the journal is its highest Altmetric score in the Society. The journal’s published paper ‘Applying phylogenomics to understand the emergence of Shiga-toxin-producing Escherichia coli O157:H7 strains causing severe human disease in the UK’ peaked at an Altmetric score of 84. This is an incredible achievement for a journal that is barely a year old, and lead author Timothy Dallman acknowledged, “I think this shows the impact that social media, and particularly Twitter, can have in rapidly disseminating scientific knowledge to our peers, the press and the public.”

At six months, Senior Editor Kat Holt reviewed the variety of papers published, from cutting-edge genomic epidemiology, antibiotic resistance, to several articles focusing on functional genomics to investigate microbial gene regulation. Also key to developing the area of microbial genomics are methods papers, which are critical to driving research forward.

Six months on and submissions are on the increase, with the launch of the Microbial Genomics poster prizes, focused interviews with the Senior Editors of each subject category and a wealth of inspiring scientists drawing interest for the journal’s feature ‘Standing on the Shoulders of Giants’.

As we continue to build a strong community of Microbial Genomics researchers, we interviewed each of our Senior Editors to get a better insight into their subject categories.

Meet the Senior Editors

Find out about their subject category, what they are most proud of achieving so far and what subjects they would like to see more of in MGen in the next 12 months.

JENNIFER GARDY

BCCDC Canada
Microbial Evolution and Epidemiology is the place for papers that shine a light on microbial population genomics, and we’re proud to say it’s becoming a go-to spot for papers in the emerging field of genomic epidemiology.

I am so proud of the remarkable calibre of authors we’ve attracted for MGen! Looking through the list of authors who have published in the journal it really is a who’s who of the microbial genomics community – there are so many people doing truly leading-edge work!

I’d love to see more genomic epidemiology outbreak reports in the journal – we can really carve out a niche for ourselves here. I’d also love to see our community start taking a look at combining genomic datasets published by multiple groups in order to do some really large-scale comparative genomics.

ALAN WALKER

University of Aberdeen, UK
Microbial Communities publishes research employing marker gene, full metagenomic or metatranscriptomic sequencing to characterise and understand the structure, function and dynamics of microbial communities present in a range of host-associated and environmental niches. One of the key strengths of the journal is the commitment to open data and open access, ensuring that both results and raw data are freely available to the wider scientific community immediately upon publication. The hope is that this will benefit submitting authors by increasing audience exposure to their research, and also benefit the scientific process by allowing others to validate or further utilise data. We would like to encourage further submissions in the area of host–microbiota interactions, with a particular emphasis on studies where the sequence data provides real biological insight into the role that microbial communities play in host health.

JUKKA CORANDER

University of Oslo, Norway
Genomic Methodologies highlights the new depths of microbial sequencing that necessitates new tools to make the most out of the data and the Genomic Methodologies focus of MGen aims to promote methods which make a difference for turning bases into biological insights. This new journal has very rapidly attracted the attention of both method developers and practitioners, publishing biological highlights with a steady pace from the start. Novel methods for pangenomic analysis are particularly welcome as subjects as the need for such tools is increasing as the data sets get more and more complex.

 

CARMEN BUCHRIESER

Institut Pasteur, France
Microbe-Niche Interactions should improve our understanding of the interactions that pathogenic, commensal or environmental microbes have with their niches. The journal welcomes articles that use new genomic, proteomic, transcriptomic, metabolomic or imaging techniques to analyse these interactions. Having an excellent, gender-balanced, motivated and innovative Editorial Board that loves working together and promotes the journal is a great achievement. We would like more high-throughput imaging and metabolomics analysis of the interactions and influences of the microbe on the host and the host on the microbe in future papers.

 

CHRISTOS OUZOUNIS

CPERI, CERTH, Greece
Systems Microbiology covers a combination of systems biology and microbial genomics, addressing big-data issues, omics approaches, perturbation experiments, networks and pathways, microbial diversity and population dynamics under a systems perspective. MGen has already published some very interesting studies on the subject, including the comparative genomics of bacterial strains, genome-wide analyses of environmental responses, clinical proteomics, and others. I would love to see more of those efforts flourish, and invite work on single-cell genomics, comparative-omics, including transciptomics, pangenome analyses and perhaps emerging application domains, such as metabolic engineering work for biofuels and bioenergy.

KATHRYN HOLT

University of Melbourne, Australia
Responses to Human Interventions covers genomic studies of microbial responses to human interventions including clinical interventions such as antibiotic therapy, vaccines or infection control measures; as well as agriculture and environmental changes such as climate change or pollution. I am proud of the variety and quality of articles published so far in MGen and also the journal’s innovative feature ‘Standing on the Shoulders on Giants’ which highlights pioneers in the field of genomics. In future we would like to engage the experimental evolution community to publish their ground-breaking studies on evolutionary responses to antimicrobial stresses, as well as those with longitudinal genomic data sets examining evolution in response to treatment and host-associated stresses.

View the journal online: http://mgen.microbiologyresearch.org

HARRIET POPE

Product Executive
[email protected]