[Bronwen Dekker]

The newly featured (and therefore open-access) protocol may of interest:

Preparative scale Baeyer–Villiger biooxidation at high concentration using recombinant Escherichia coli and in situ substrate feeding and product removal process
http://www.nature.com/nprot/journal/v3/n3/full/nprot.2007.532.html

Our sample issue for this year actually also contains quite a few chemistry protocols. It can be accessed here:
http://www.nature.com/nprot/journal/v3/n1/index.html

I would be very interested in your thoughts as to how we can improve our chemistry articles or on ideas of others that you would like to see commissioned.
If you have an idea for a protocol that you would like to write, please submit a pre-submission enquiry using our manuscript tracking system:
http://mts-np.nature.com/cgi-bin/main.plex
The most important consideration is that the method has been shown to work in a primary research paper and that there is some support for the idea that it will be useful to other researchers.

[sjb]

Out of interest, how do you see the Chemistry at Nature protocols standing after Nature Chemistry http://www.nature.com/nchem/marketing/index.html hits the electronic newstands?

Is it this you may want to internally compete with, or are you looking like more like again a modern day Org. Synth. ?

S

[Bronwen Dekker]

I for one am very pleased and excited that NPG will finally be launching Nature Chemistry! And think that the fact that Nature will have a journal devoted to chemistry will have the added side-benefit of increasing the traffic of chemists to our site as well. Though of course the importance of Nature Chemistry in itself cannot be understated.

Because Nature Protocols only publishes methods that have already been used to generate results in primary research articles, we are not in direct competition with any journal that publishes new results (or even new methods).

The value of the Nature Protocol is that the manuscript focuses on the details of the method: we can, for example, include photographs/diagrams of the equipment setup and the reaction in progress; and provide troubleshooting advice advising what to do if the experiment doesn't work. Because we are for all intents and purposes and on-line only journal, we do not have the page restrictions that other journals have, so we can include any number of figures, tables and boxes to illustrate the method.

And yes, Organic Synthesis is a better example of a journal that we might be in competition with for chemistry protocols.

[Mitch]

To bad Nature protocols emphasizes biological protocols. We came up with a neat materials protocol but had no place to put it. Hmmmm, must think of some cool biological protocolish idea...

[Bronwen Dekker]

To clarify: the categories that the Nature Protocols team is working with are:

Biochemistry and Protein analysis
Cell and Developmental biology
Cell and tissue culture
Chemical modification
Computational and theoretical biology
Genetic analysis
Genetic modification
Genomics/proteomics
Imaging
Immunological techniques
Isolation, purification and separation
Microbiology and Virology
Model organisms
Nucleic Acid based Molecular Biology
Nanotechnology
Neuroscience
Pharmacology and toxicology
Plant biology
Spectroscopy and structural analysis
Synthetic chemistry

It is frustrating that it has taken so long for these to be changed on our site as we actually have many protocols that are "non-biological", and it is less easy to find them as they are inappropriately categorised! We have been assured though that these changes will be happening very soon!

The bottom line is that you are enthusiastic about a chemistry protocol idea it would be worth running it by us - perhaps if it is an area that is new to us, we could commission some other experts in the field so that it is not lonely.

[Bronwen Dekker]

Just a short note to let you know that the new categories are up on our site.  These include:

Chemical Modification
http://www.natureprotocols.com/chemical_modification/

Synthetic Chemistry
http://www.natureprotocols.com/synthetic_chemistry/