I have taught a minicourse on Protein-Protein Association for many years. The course is aimed at cell and molecular biology graduate students, and has six 80-minute lecture periods covering general principles and discussing key papers. We start with the simplied model introduced by Chothia and Janin in 1975 and read the Amit Poljak 1986 paper on the first crystal structure of an antibody bound to its protein antigen, before moving on to “hot spots,” such as cooperativity, kinetics, intrinsically disordered proteins. Overall this course offers comprehensive coverage of how proteins associate with each other.
Over the years, I developed a set of lecture notes to give the students in this course. I also posted these notes on my web page. Some professors at other institutions began using them for their own classes and offered me valuable feedback. In time I realized there was no text in existence that covered the general principles of protein-protein association and so I started polishing my lecture notes in the form of short chapters. Some present general principles and others contain my summary of landmark papers to be read and discussed. By 2018, I had polished the notes into a short textbook.
As I considered my options, my main goal for publishing the text was to make it widely available. By happy coincidence, the Biophysical Society had just launched a new initiative to publish a series of ebooks on biophysics topics. This was in collaboration with the Institute of Physics (IOP), which has several series of ebooks on a broader range of topics. About 1,000 academic institutions worldwide subscribe to IOP.
The process of submission was much like that for a major review article. First, I submitted an outline to Jessica Fricchione, the Senior Commisioning Editor at IOP Publishing. Then, it was reviewed by the BPS-IOP Advisory Board. After they completed their appraisal, they invited a full submission. My full text was sent to two referees who returned brief favorable reports before the editors decided to commission a detailed review and edit by a top expert in the field. This brought a number of suggestions that improved the clarity of my text. The reviews, editorial suggestions, and revisions took about three months to complete from the date of the original submission.
The editorial staff at IOP were great to work with. They handled formatting the book and were available to answer questions by email. They sent proofs to me within a few weeks, and were receptive to my final changes and minor rewrites. Only six months after the original submission, I was delighted to receive an email from IOP saying, “Your book has been published.” Indeed, "Principles of Protein-Protein Association" was available for download in PDF or Kindle format through the Duke library, and the other ~1,000 institutions with IOP subscription. It is also now available from Amazon.
Do you have a set of notes or written coverage of a topic in biophysics, something more than a review article? If it can be arranged as a set of chapters for an ebook, I recommend you consider the IOP-Biophysical Society venture.
- Harold Erickson