Monday, June 16, 2014

Two papers accepted on the same day, published on the same day

I have long been working on this paper "Hidden synaptic differences underlie..." which was just published in eLife last week. It describes the mechanism underlying different susceptibility to brain injury among individuals. Individuals, I mean sea slug Tritonia individuals.
   This work was first presented in 2008 at SfN in Chicago and I received a Faculty of 1000 recognition. They interviewed me and the video was uploaded on YouTube.
   It was tough paper to write.  There are so many tedious correlograms. Reviewers disliked them, and I agree because most of them show no significance. Dynamic clamping gave some good taste to this manuscript, although some may point out that I should have called it dynamic current injection rather than "clamping." The variable for presynaptic voltage was fixed and used as a constant parameter. I only used dynamic clamp software. If truly clamped, however, the injected current would not be strong enough to have an effect on membrane activity because of space clamp issue. Reviewers were supportive but literally told me to rewrite the whole manuscript. I agreed. I rewrote it.

Meanwhile, I was doing revision of another paper on the swim CPG of a hooded nudibranch, Melibe leonina. This is totally different topic; it simply re-describes the CPG circuit for Melibe swimming behavior. This paper may be boring for most of readers because it is so descriptive. But, to me, it was such fun to work on; it was like building a CPG from scratch. Very classical and straightforward. I did not have to make it sounds sexy like the other eLife paper. I knew this paper should get accepted easily. It did.

These two  manuscripts were resubmitted on the same day. Both got accepted on the same day. And published on the same day. I am trying to push out 3 more papers this year.