Spotlight on... Michael Ibba Michael Ibba is Professor and Director of the Biochemistry Graduate Program at Ohio State University, and a member of the FEBS Letters Editorial Board since 2008. An Englishman of Italian ori- gins, Ibba reflects his cultural background by being an eloquent and passionate scientist with a friendly and good-natured demeanor. We have had the pleasure to interview Professor Ibba in order to give our readers and authors an idea of who is handling manuscripts in the fields of RNA, protein synthesis and translation at FEBS Letters. What does your research currently focus on? We are interested in the translation-related stratagems that bacteria develop in order to evade stress and increase survival. One of these consists in making mistakes in protein synthesis [1]. Several microorganisms increase their error rate under stress to enhance morphological diversity and to be able to colonize and survive in more diverse niches. We focus on the errors that take place before the ribosome and cannot be corrected by the ribosome. We also study the ability of some bacteria to divert ami- no acids away from protein synthesis and use them to develop antibiotic resistance. For example, some pathogens can snatch ly- sines from tRNAs and attach them to the phosphatidylglycerol of membrane phospholipids in order to invert the charge of the lipids. This way the positive charge of the lysines will repel cationic anti- microbial peptides. Another interesting mechanism involves a protein called elon- gation factor P (EF-P) that mimics a transfer RNA in its shape and size, but is in fact a protein. EF-P can be aminoacylated by a specific lysyl-tRNA synthetase that has lost its tRNA binding domain. Once the lysine is attached, the protein is thought to occupy the E site of the ribosome and speed up the synthesis of polyproline stretches, which are typically found in Salmonella virulence factors and are normally translated at a slow rate. Which is your favorite among your numerous publications? During my postdoc in Dieter Söll’s lab at Yale, some of us were asked to look for missing essential components of the translation machinery in archaea. I set out to look for an aminoacyl tRNA syn- thetase starting from a very small amount of cells. The project was very exciting, fun, and it simply worked right away. I can still remember the thrill I felt looking at a band on the gel correspond- ing to a protein that no one else had ever seen before! We pub- lished this in Science, and it is one of my favorite papers [2]. As an author, what feature do you like in a scientific journal? I like a balanced editorial process that is not subject to fashion or to editorial whims, and I like getting a clean, reliable decision that you can respect at the end of the process. Once, I found out after one of my papers got rejected that we never saw one of the reviews, the editor had kept it away. I like a journal to be honest and transparent. I think that the reason why we get so little negative feedback from authors who get rejected in FEBS Letters is because we treat them with respect and we do our best to give the authors a clear, balanced and fair experience. What, in your opinion, are the main assets of FEBS Letters? One is reliability, as I just mentioned. I also think that the lim- ited length of FEBS Letters articles is a good format, which allows you to make neat and discreet points. You don’t need to drown people in data to convince them about something. There’s a paper that I published in FEBS Letters in the mid nineties, which keeps on getting cited, and it’s a very simple, to the point paper that JBC re- jected! We just shortened it, made it cleaner and sent it to FEBS Letters. Is there anything you would change about your work? Actually, I am the one who is in constant transformation. A big change (and challenge) came when I first became an independent investigator in Denmark. At the time I thought I could go on like when I was a postdoc. Gradually, I became less naïve, and learned to reconfigure how I did everything and think like a PI. I learned a lot on how to run a lab from my mentors, Hauke Hennecke and Dieter Söll. Things became easier since I am at Ohio State University. There’s a big RNA community here and the atmosphere is great. The only person you can blame for not being successful here is yourself. Nevertheless, another change came recently, when I was elected member of the American Academy of Microbiology and Chair of our Microbiology Department. I am a biochemist by 0014-5793/$36.00 Ó 2013 Federation of European Biochemical Societies. Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.febslet.2013.07.001 FEBS Letters 587 (2013) 2289–2290 journal homepage: www.FEBSLetters.org