F1000 Posters Editor's Choice - the Top Three Posters of 2010

London, United Kingdom, February 06, 2011 --(PR.com)-- F1000 Posters announce the Editor’s Choice for the top three biomedical research posters of 2010.

F1000 Posters, a new open access poster repository from Faculty of 1000 (F1000), has selected the top three posters from those identified by the F1000 Faculty of 10,000 experts across Biology and Medicine as being some of the most exciting posters presented in 2010. Submissions since the launch of F1000 Posters in June 2010 cover the whole breadth of biomedical research from genetics to hematology, ecology to public health, neuroscience to emergency care.

Novel mechanism for long-term memory?
The highest viewed poster of 2010 was from Susan McQuown and colleagues at the University of California, Irvine, which demonstrated that the enzyme histone deacetylase 3 (HDAC3) acts as a negative regulator of long-term memory formation. Their research showed that delivering an HDAC3 inhibitor to the brain can enhance memory formation in mice. Commenting on this work, F1000 Faculty Member Karl-Peter Giese of King’s College, London, said: “This study is a major advance for the understanding of memory formation … [and] may be used in future to pharmacologically enhance memory”.

Nonrandom sex in plants
Using Arabidopsis thaliana as a model organism, Robert Swanson (Valparaiso University, Chile) and colleagues demonstrated that nonrandom mating in plants occurs as a result of discrimination between certain traits in a mate, and were able to define the genetic elements involved. F1000 Faculty Member Sheila McCormick from University of California, Berkeley, highlighted this poster as being a particularly important advance saying: “I thought this poster was interesting because it used a simple method to document pollen competition between different ecotypes of Arabidopsis”.

Early biomarkers of stroke severity
Finally, Hongxia Lei and colleagues at the Université de Lausanne, Switzerland identified early biomarkers to more reliably estimate the severity of transient cerebral attack (TIA) or “mini stroke” compared with current imaging techniques. This discovery could facilitate more rapid decisions about treatment, therefore improving a patient’s outcome as F1000 Faculty Member Johannes Boltze (Fraunhofer-Institut für Zelltherapie und Immunologie IZI, Leipzig, Germany) commented: “Predicting outcome following ischemic stroke in the early stages is pivotal to designing the best treatment concepts for each individual patient. The method introduced in this work may have the potential to change this situation. Although thorough verification by future studies is needed to assess the true potential of the suggested biomarker strategy, the approach looks quite promising.”

F1000 Posters has grown rapidly since its launch in June 2010 and now includes posters from over 130 national and international conferences. Rebecca Lawrence, Director, New Product Development at F1000 said: “We are delighted at the speed at which F1000 Posters has grown. In 2011, we have some exciting plans for the site including tools to interact with presenters, the ability to annotate posters through text, audio and video, and neat tools to improve the ability to view these large posters online. We would like to thank everyone who has deposited so far and congratulate all the poster authors selected for evaluation in F1000, and in particular these top 3 poster authors.”

To find out more about Faculty of 1000 or F1000 Posters please contact Eleanor Howell on +44 (0)20 7631 9129 or email press@f1000.com. For more information, visit http://f1000.com.

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About Faculty of 1000
Faculty of 1000 is a unique online service that helps you stay informed of high impact articles and posters, and access the opinions of global leaders in biology and medicine. Our distinguished international faculty selects and evaluates key articles across these fields, providing a rapidly updated, authoritative guide to the life science literature that matters.

About F1000 Posters
F1000 Posters gives poster presenters and supporting societies the opportunity to make their work known to a wider audience, enabling much greater discussion on new research and opening up opportunities for new collaborations. Posters deposited will be reviewed by our world-renowned Faculty who will select posters that they consider to be particularly interesting and important, and write evaluations for inclusion in the F1000 literature evaluation service.