It is a great pleasure to acknowledge our dedicated reviewers and editorial board members who gave their time and expertise to evaluate the articles submitted last year. As I’ve mentioned each year, it is our intention to maintain and improve the quality of the journal; our impact factor has increased since, which is encouraging. This year we welcome three new editorial board members: Oscar Alzate, Andrew Howard and Dagmar Ringe. As you know, we lost Gunther Blobel last year and will be dedicating a special memorial issue in May in his honor, entitled “Protein Targeting and Transport,” guest edited by Professors Ross Dalbey of The Ohio State University and Andreas Kuhn of Hohenheim University.

We look forward to an exciting year with the Journal, reviewing high quality papers and reviews; we also have some additional Special Issues in mind that will be completed by 2020. Our authors should be aware of our requirements for computational papers: they should be clear about which docking and molecular dynamics algorithms or software packages are being used as well as details on the system parametrization, simulations conditions etc. In addition, docking calculations (virtual screening, QSAR, etc.) should be validated either by experimental studies or one or more reliable theoretical cross-validation methods. These details can be found under Instructions to Authors on The Protein Journal website. We also entertain concise review articles from experts in the field and always appreciate advance notice before submission so that we can plan accordingly.

This journal could not be successful without the mentorship of the Founding Editor, M. Zouhair Atassi, the high quality editorial board, the reviewers and the authors who submit their work to this publication.