A triumvirate of Section Editors moving Structural Biology Communications ahead

The IUCr and I would like to welcome Cristy Nonato and Jon Agirre as Section Editors of Structural Biology Communications – Acta Crystallographica F. With these appointments, we believe we have assembled a team of editors with knowledge in a wide range of structural biology disciplines and a reasonable geographical diversity.

Figure 1 The three Section Editors of Structural Biology Communications – Acta Cryst. F, Cristy Nonato, Jon Agirre and Mark van Raaij.

Maria Cristina Nonato (Cristy) is Full Professor at the School of Pharmaceutical Sciences of Ribeirão Preto at the University of São Paulo and coordinator of the Protein Crystallography Laboratory of Ribeirão Preto. She is President of the FCFRP Research Commission, President of the Brazilian Association of Crystallography, and Co-founder and Coordinator of the division of Structural Biology and Screening of Bioactive Compounds at the Centre for the Research and Advancement in Fragments and Molecular Targets. She is also a member of the IUCr Executive Committee.

Cristy completed her undergraduate studies in Physics and earned postgraduate degrees at the master's and doctorate levels in Applied Physics from the Institute of Physics at the University of São Paulo in São Carlos. She has 25 years of experience in structural biology, working mainly on crystallographic structure determination of proteins, enzyme kinetics, biophysical and biochemical characterization of proteins, and searching for ligands by in vitro and in silico methods as prototypes for the design of pharmaceutical drugs. She has a special interest in crystallographic fragment screening, an area of increasing importance and biomedical relevance (Martin & Noble, 2022). Cristy has co-authored more than seventy research papers, of which nine were published in IUCr journals (four in Acta Cryst. D and five in Acta Cryst. F).

Jon Agirre is a Royal Society University Research Fellow (Assistant Professor) at the Department of Chemistry at the University of York, UK. His liaisons with Acta Cryst. F started in 2018, guest editing a special issue on Glycoproteins and Protein–Carbohydrate Complexes and he has been a Co-editor of the journal since 2019. He also helped edit a special issue of Acta Cryst. D on Model Building, Validation and Representation in MX and cryoEM. He is co-chair of CCP4 Working Group 2, a member of the CCP4 Executive Committee and the Instruct-ERIC representative on the 3D-Bioinfo (Elixir) steering committee. Jon is committed to addressing the obvious gender, racial and ethnic representation imbalances in computational structural biology.

Career wise, Jon studied Computer Engineering at the University of the Basque Country in Donostia and completed his PhD in Biochemistry at the Unidad de Biofisica of the Spanish Research Council (CSIC) in Bilbao. He is an expert in structural bio-informatics, crystallography of glycoproteins and all that jazz (he is an aficionado of that kind of music). He is probably most well known for the program Privateer (Agirre et al., 2015), which efficiently builds, validates and corrects carbohydrate structures. Jon has co-authored 47 research papers, of which twelve were published in IUCr journals (eleven in Acta Cryst. D and one in Acta Cryst. F), including the latest CCP4 general citation article (Agirre et al., 2023).

Janet Newman has recently stepped down as Section Editor. We thank her for her enthusiasm and significant contributions during these last five years and hope to continue to develop her ideas for the journal. One of these ideas was to involve young scientists more, including undergraduate students – another was a more rigorous and precise description of crystallization conditions and crystallization experiments. Macromolecular crystallization is a trial without knowing the exact details of previous successful experiments carried out with similar samples. This idea can of course be extended to how samples for NMR spectroscopy and cryo-electron microscopy have been prepared.

Together, we hope to grow Structural Biology Communi­cations – Acta Cryst. F as a premier journal for short but high-quality structural biology articles, covering macromolecular crystallography, cryo-electron microscopy, NMR spectroscopy and other techniques to interrogate biomolecular structure and function. Watch this space during the next few months to find out about the new ideas we have for developing the journal! And do share with us your opinions and interesting new manuscripts – Research Communications, Methods Communications and short Topical Reviews are all welcome.