ABOUT THE JOURNAL

• Aims and scope of journal
• Impact factor
• ISSN and eISSN
• Editors and Editorial Board

Aims and scope of journal

The ISME Journal seeks to promote diverse and integrated areas of microbial ecology spanning the breadth of microbial life, including bacteria, archaea, microbial eukaryotes, and viruses. Contributions of broad biological interest and impact are especially encouraged. Topics of particular interest within the journal's scope include those listed below:

• Microbial population and community ecology

  • Theoretical advances in microbial population and community ecology, including novel theoretical development relevant to the diversity and structure of microbial populations and communities, advances in modeling and comparisons of microbial ecological principles with those in macroecology
  • Biogeography of microbial populations
  • Environmental factors (biotic and abiotic) defining the distribution and abundance of microbial populations
  • Integrated advances in microbial ecophysiology
  • Phage genetics and ecology and environmental virology, including studies of interactions between viruses and the environment, vectors of viral transmission, epidemiology, and diversity (including generation and maintenance)
  • Community level research of microbial assemblages, with emphasis on the contribution of individuals and populations
  • Microbial survival and persistence mechanisms: Development and selection for resistance (heavy metals, antibiotics etc.)

• Microbe-microbe and microbe-host interactions

  • Microbial communication and signaling, and advances that allow study on scales relevant to microbial interactivities
  • Plant-microbe interactions, including feed back and response pathways, underlying mechanisms, environmental cues, unique traits, evolution, adaptation and fitness
  • Threat of emerging diseases (pathogenicity, epidemiology, ecology of reservoirs, vectors and host)
  • Symbioses and syntrophic relationships
  • Microbial contribution to medical biotechnology and microbial therapy
  • Commensal microbial ecology - intestinal, oral, etc.

• Evolutionary genetics

  • Ecological aspects of experimental evolution
  • Insights into genome evolution and adaptation
  • Genetics and ecology of the horizontal gene pool
  • Advances in mathematical and evolutionary genetics

• Integrated genomics and post-genomics approaches in microbial ecology

  • Studies of in situ function, gene regulation and expression
  • Metagenomic genomic approaches to understanding and accessing the genomic potential of microbial communities
  • Novel microbial ecology approaches involving (environmental) proteomics and metabolomics
  • Theoretical and practical advances in Bioinformatics, including improved linkages between ecological parameters and molecular data, as well as advances in curation and annotation practices
  • Novel "-omics' approaches that address microbial activities and potential at the single-cell level

• Microbial engineering

  • Environmental Biotechnology, including ecological interactions key to waste water treatment, water management, biofilters, energy production, etc.
  • Development and mechanisms of microbial biocatalysts
  • Developments in bioremediation and biodegradation
  • Microbial contributions and potential in biofuel technologies
  • Microbial process modeling and its application

• Geomicrobiology and microbial contributions to geochemical cycles

  • Integrated advances in biogeochemistry
  • Microbial contributions to geochemical cycles
  • Importance and mechanisms of microbe-mineral interactions

• Microbial ecology and functional diversity of natural habitats

  • Terrestrial and subsurface microbial ecology
  • Aquatic and sediment microbial ecology
  • Linking phylogeny and function in diverse ecosystems - common, novel and extreme
  • Biofilm functional microbial ecology
  • Aero - microbiology (distribution, source impact etc), including issues of climate and dispersal
  • Microbial processes and interactions in extreme or unusual environments

• Microbial ecosystem impacts

  • Impacts of microbial processes on climate change, and impacts of climate change on microbial communities and processes
  • Food web structure, nutrient flow, and biological transformations from micro- through macro- scales
  • Systems microbiology and integration of microbial ecology into systems ecology

Impact Factor

2008 Impact Factor: 5.029*

Rank:
10/124 Ecology

*2008 Journal Citation Reports (Thomson Reuters 2009)

ISSN and eISSN

The international standard serial number (ISSN) for The ISME Journal is 1751-7362, and the electronic international standard serial number (eISSN) is 1751-7370.

Editors and Editorial Board

Editors

Mark Bailey

Mark Bailey is the Science Director for the Biodiversity programme at the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology, Oxford. His main research interests include environmental genomics, microbial ecology and the evolutionary relevance of the horizontal gene pool.

John Heidelberg

John Heidelberg is an Associate Professor in the Department of Biological Sciences, Marine and Environmental Biology Section of The University of Southern California. His main interests are in microbial genomics, metagenomics, and the application of bioinformatics tools to address questions in marine microbial ecology.

Janet Jansson

Janet Jansson is a Senior Staff Scientist in the Earth Sciences Division at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, California, USA and Professor of Environmental Microbiology at the Swedish University of Agriculture, Uppsala, Sweden. Her main research interests include application of different "omics" approaches to environmental microbiology with emphasis on microbial ecology of soil, sediment and the human gut.

George Kowalchuk

George Kowalchuk is a senior scientist within the Department of Terrestrial Microbial Ecology at the Netherlands Institute of Ecology and holds the professor's chair in Plant-Microbe Interactions at the Institute of Ecological Science of the Free University of Amsterdam. His main research foci include drivers of microbial diversity and function in the rhizosphere, environmental genomics of ecologically relevant microorganisms, and determining the roles of plant-microbe interactions in nutrient acquisition and cycling.

Editorial Board

Oded Beja, Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, Israel
Antje Boetius, Max Planck Institute for Marine Microbiology, Germany
Philip L Bond, University of Queensland, Australia
Paola Bonfante, University of Torino & IPP- CNR, Italy
Colleen M Cavanaugh, Harvard University, USA
Ricardo Cavicchioli, The University of New South Wales, Australia
Rita Colwell, University of Maryland, USA
Thomas P Curtis, Newcastle University, UK
Holger Daims, Universitaet Wien, Austria
Thomas Egli, Swiss Federal Institute of Aquatic Science and Technology (EAWAG), Switzerland
Jed A Fuhrman, University of Southern California, USA
Clay Fuqua, Indiana University, USA
Stephen Giovannoni, Oregon State University, USA
Dieter Haas, University of Lausanne, Switzerland
Jo Handelsman, University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA
Ian M Head, University of Newcastle, UK
Claire Horner-Devine, University of Washington, USA
Philip Hugenholtz, DOE Joint Genome Institute, USA
David M Karl, University of Hawaii, USA
Yoichi Kamagata, National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST), Japan
Kazuhiro Kogure, The University of Tokyo, Japan
Johannes Gijs Kuenen, TU Delft, The Netherlands
Laura Leff, Kent State University, USA
Wen-Tso Liu, National University of Singapore, Singapore
Derek R Lovley, University of Massachusetts, USA
Esperanza Martinez-Romero, Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico, Cuernavaca, Mexico
Leda Cristina Mendonca-Hagler, Univiversity Federal Rio De Janeiro-CCS, Brazil
J Colin Murrell, University of Warwick, UK
Gerard Muyzer, Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands
Karsten Pedersen, Göteborg University, Sweden
Juan L Ramos, Estaciín Experimental del Zaidín, Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, Spain
David Relman, Veterans Administration Medical Association, USA
Bruce Rittmann, Center for Environmental Biotechnology, USA
Eugene Rosenberg, Tel-Aviv University, Israel
E G Ned Ruby, University of Hawaii, USA
Christa Schleper, University of Bergen, Norway
Thomas M Schmidt, Michigan State University USA
Pascal Simonet, Université Claude Bernard, France
Kornelia Smalla, Federal Biological Research Centre for Agriculture and forestry, Germany
Ken Takai, SUGAR Program, JAMSTEC, Japan
Andreas P Teske, University of North Carolina, USA
Jan Roelof Van Der Meer, University of Lausanne, Switzerland
Jan Dirk Van Elsas, University of Groningen, The Netherlands
Willy Verstraete, Ghent University, Belgium
Peter Young, University of York, UK
Hongxun Zhang, Graduate University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, China
Jizhong Zhou, University of Oklahoma, USA

Founders

Yehuda Cohen
Staffan Kjelleberg
Hilary Lappin-Scott
Hans Van Veen

Editorial Office

Sarash de Wilde, Heteren, The Netherlands