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DOI: 10.1055/s-0035-1555903
This Year’s Best Paper Award now Decided!
Publication History
Publication Date:
14 July 2015 (online)
Dear Reader,
It is time again for the Thieme Award for the Best Original Paper and it is my great pleasure to announce it. The decisive criteria for this prize are based on scientific quality as well as on the number of citations drawn so far. The winners receive a prize money of USD 2.000.
This year’s winner is a paper by C. Bernecker and coworkers, entitled “microRNA Expressions in CD4+ and CD8+ T-cell Subsets in Autoimmune Thyroid Diseases” [1].
Here is what the jury, Professors Nawroth and Gudermann, have to say about their choice:
The scientific focus of the paper by Bernecker et al. is the pathophysiology of autoimmune thyroid diseases (AITD), i. e., Graves’ disease (GT) and Hashimoto’s thyroiditis (HT). So far, the exact mechanisms shaping the immune response in DG and HT patients are only incompletely understood.
Previously, the authors have reported expression levels of pertinent immunomodulatory miRNAs in thyroid tissue of AITD patients and healthy controls [2]. microRNAs (miRNAs) are small RNAs about 20 nucleotides in length that control protein expression by binding to complementary mRNA sequences leading to degradation of these double-stranded RNAs and/or to inhibition of translation. Although a significant contribution of miRNAs to autoimmune responses has been suspected for long, detailed knowledge is still lacking.
The authors hypothesized that the miRNA variations observed in thyroid tissue originated from infiltrating lymphocytes, a dominant cell population in fine needle aspirations. Accordingly, the aim of the current study was to investigate variations of immunomodulatory microRNAs in peripheral blood immune cells of AITD patients [1]. The authors identified 2 microRNAs, miRNA200a and miRNA155, whose expression significantly varied in CD4+ and CD8+ T-cells of patients suffering from GD or HT.
In the future, it will be enlightening to investigate the functional relevance of these miRNA variations and to unambiguously identify target genes.
This study is an important step towards exploring uncharted scientific territory and significantly extends our current knowledge of autoimmune responses in thyroid diseases.
Congratulations to the winners!
This is now the third time already that Thieme and Experimental and Clinical Endocrinology&Diabetes are singling out a top research paper in this way. The previous winners [3] [4] have gone on to be amongst the top 10 cited Experimental and Clinical Endocrinology&Diabetes papers in the recently released 2014 Journal Impact Factor. We are very proud of them and are sure that this year’s winner will go on to be similarly successful.
Dr. Regina Wenzel
Publishing Editor