A focus on cell proliferation and death

you have noticed, the Editorial Ofﬁce has made majorefforts to redesign and improve the journal appearance andcontents. This has included the simpliﬁcation of the submis-sion formats and the introduction of Commentaries to high-light important manuscripts. I believe that this will bring anincreased visibility of interesting manuscripts to a broader sci-entiﬁc audience.The September issue starts with another novelty: focusingon a speciﬁc topic in a given issue. As these papers are notinvited but are regular submissions, focusing on certain topicswill depend on the manuscripts we have ‘‘in-house. ’’The September issue presents a collection of manuscriptsthat are loosely related to DNA analysis, cell proliferation, anddeath. It starts with an exciting review by the group of Darzyn-kiewicz (page 648) on ATM activation and histone H2AXphosphorylation to determine DNA damage by cytometrictools. The review elegantly shows the value of ﬂow- andimage-cytometry in studying factors that affect DNA repairand explore the linkage between DNA damage, cell cyclecheckpoints, and initiation of apoptosis.King et al. (page 668) investigated apoptosis induction inJurkat cells using three different ﬂow cytometric methods:cytochrome c release, loss of mitochondrial cardiolipin, anddecrease of mitochondrial membrane potential. They demon-strated that in their model system, cytochrome c release is agood marker but underestimates the fraction of apoptoticcells.Hollier et al. (page 675) evaluated two assays for apopto-sis detection in clinical samples. They proposed two independ-ent novel assays that enable determination of not only themajor apoptosis pathways but also the cell types affected.Shi et al. (page 686) investigated the inﬂuence of over-expression of glutamate-cysteine ligase (GCL) on the resist-ance of single-strand breaks to peroxide treatment in two celllines. Their study yielded the important ﬁnding that geneticfactors affecting GCL expression have an impact on DNA sin-gle-strand breaks and thus affect susceptibility towards cancer.In the study of Slaninova et al. (page 700), quaternarybenzo[c]phenanthridine binding to DNA of viable cells wasdemonstrated. Because of their ﬂuorescent characteristics, thenuclear architecture, chromosomes, and apoptotic fragmentscould be visualized in ﬂuorescence microscopy and ﬂow cyto-metry. The authors also stated that a cell cycle analysis wouldbe possible by using the alkaloid macarpine.Intracellular Glutathione (GSH) is attracting attention inthe investigation of many diseases due to its role in cell protec-tion. Hamilton et al. (page 709) focused on rapid assessment ofGSH levels in clinical settings. Using three different drug treat-ments they demonstrated that the changes in GSH concentra-tion could be detected semi-quantitatively by CM-SNARF.Quantitation of DNA content and cell cycle are prerequi-sites for the analysis of changes in the cell cycle. Wang andHuang (page 716) proposed a mixture-model classiﬁcation forDNA content analysis. They demonstrated in a model systemthe sensitivity of their approach for detecting cell cycle differ-ences in mixed populations.Lin et al. (page 724) showed a multi-model approach forquantitative studies of 3D confocal microscope images. Withtheir method, nuclear segmentation and classiﬁcation of heter-ogenous populations of cell nuclei—like in tissues with multi-ple cell types and different nuclear features—could be ana-lyzed simultaneously.Since its early years, the journal Cytometry stood out bypublishing groundbreaking technologies like DNA ﬂow cyto-metry of fresh-frozen (1) or parafﬁn embedded tissues (2),both being standard methods today. Over the last few years