Thinking about RNA-Binding Proteins: Emerging Roles in Human Health and Diseases

Dear Colleagues,

RNA-binding proteins (RBPs) play essential roles in human biology and pathogenesis. RBPs are essential tuners of posttranscriptional gene regulation, playing a pleiotropic role in RNA biology, processing, and metabolism from alternative splicing, polyadenylation, mRNA stability, transport, and mRNA localization, to translational control and regulation of coding and non-coding transcripts, like miRNAs, circular and long-non coding RNA. 

Recent studies opened a renewed view about our understanding of RBP networks associated with molecular and cell biology, genetics, diseases associated with phenotype, and translational biomedicine. RBPs have been associated with several diseases, including neurological diseases, cancer, immunity response, and infective pathology. Significant progress has been made in our understanding of RBPs through integrative approaches and methods, and many exploratory routes are driving unexpected novel developments from basic mechanisms to discovering potential biomarkers to therapeutic strategies. 

The aim of this special issue is to explore all aspects of RBPs research-oriented in human diseases, from molecular mechanisms to regulatory roles, from effects in mRNA binding and translational control to identification and measurement of RNA-protein interactions, discovering of novel RBP family, associated to neurodegenerative diseases, aging, senescence, psychiatric diseases, apoptosis, angiogenesis, cardiovascular diseases, cancer, infectious disease, as Covid-19, but also autoimmunity and muscular disorders.

We invite authors to submit their original research as well as review articles describing emerging molecular aspects of RBP biology and translational medicine findings and future therapeutic applications, mapping the geography of RNA-Binding Proteins in human health and diseases.

Dr. Christian Barbato 

Guest Editor

Manuscripts should be submitted via our online editorial system at https://imr.propub.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to start your submission. Manuscripts can be submitted now or up until the deadline. All papers will go through peer-review process. Accepted papers will be published in the journal (as soon as accepted) and meanwhile listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, reviews as well as short communications are preferred. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office to announce on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts will be thoroughly refereed through a double-blind peer-review process. Please visit the Instruction for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) in this open access journal is 2500 USD. Submitted manuscripts should be well formatted in good English.