We are proud to be entering 2018 for The Protein Journal. Please be sure to read our modified aims and scope in About the Journal and Instructions to Authors as we are occasionally modifying these to fit the changes in the protein science arena. We have also added a second Associate Editor, Todd A. Wells, to help us cover the spectroscopic and physical biochemistry aspects of protein chemistry and biophysics. We are also extremely grateful to the expert reviewers who have been recognized in this issue for their 2017 service.

We strive to be able to turn around your submissions as quickly as possible, but this is mostly dependent on the punctuality of our expert reviewers. We sometimes have to wait over a week to learn that a potential reviewer has failed to answer our invitation. Consequently, we are updating our reviewer database this year to obtain current, valid email addresses and enrich our expertise data with relevant keywords provided by each registered reviewer. Please participate in this exercise at it will enhance your submission experiences in the future as well.

We are experiencing an increased number of submissions of work utilizing computational and predictive methods. Sometimes, the articles lack enough details about the computational methods or any experimental verification. Consequently, the Editorial Board has advised that the authors 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.

Our goals for the The Protein Journal remain to reflect new and evolving fields in the protein related area, to maintain a record of accepting only high quality, innovative state-of-the-art science, to publish occasional special issues on contemporary topics and proceedings from workshops and symposia. Of course, we rely heavily on the mentorship of Founding Editor M. Zouhair Atassi and the readers and contributors of this prestigious journal.