60 Years Following F. Ritossa's Discovery of Heat Stress Response: Novel Advances in Exploring and Exploiting Heat Shock Proteins

Dear Colleagues,

It was 60 years ago, namely in 1962 when Prof. Ferruccio Ritossa has published his outstanding finding that cells exhibit very strong transcriptional activity being exposed to higher (cell-stressing) temperatures. Protein products of that stress-responsive transcriptional activity were identified later and are now known as ‘heat shock proteins’ (HSPs).

Structure and properties of HSPs as well as regulation of their expression and functions have been studied for several decades. It was elucidated that most HSPs are molecular chaperones that catalyze folding of polypeptide chains and such functioning allows HSPs to control virtually all vital processes in the cell and also ensure its post-stress survival. Importantly, implication of HSPs in human health and some pathologies including cancer, ischemia, heart failure, neurodegenerative diseases and others was established. Many of the current HSP-related studies are aimed at adopting HSPs as either targets or tools for theranostics.

The main goal of this Special Issue is to present some recent advances in exploring HSPs that may be significant for medicine and biotechnology. We welcome both research articles and reviews covering such topics as HSP-involving mechanisms of cell regulation and cytoprotection, roles of HSPs in pathogenesis or alleviation of certain human diseases, approaches to HSP-based therapy or diagnostics, HSP-based vaccines, HSP-containing exosomes and nanoparticles etc.

I look forward to receiving your manuscripts.

Dr. Alexander E. Kabakov

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.