IEEE Life Sciences Letters Scope

The IEEE Life Sciences Letters (LSL) is a new digital, peer reviewed open access journal dedicated to the timely publication of high quality manuscripts that apply methods of quantitative analysis to biological problems at the molecular, cellular, organ, human and/or population levels. The key scientific themes addressed by the journal will initially include personalized medicine, pharmaceutical engineering, synthetic biology, and systems biology. The LSL publication will focus on shorter papers with a quick turnaround. The maximum length will be 4 IEEE two-column pages.

The journal encourages submissions across a wide range of topics in the life sciences, with particular emphasis on the following 4 themes:

Personalized medicine

  • Data mining methods for extracting meaning from biological data
  • Customization of therapy to individual patients
  • Big-data and Omics approaches to biomarkers and therapeutics for complex diseases
  • Micro/nanofluidics technologies related to Omics
  • Noninvasive physiological monitoring using optical technology

Pharmaceutical engineering

  • Control principles that led to novel approaches to drug target identification
  • Development and manufacturing of products, processes, and components in the pharmaceutical industry
  • Application of engineering principles to clinical studies for purposes of safety and efficacy
  • Engineering techniques for discovering, modifying, or designing therapeutic agents

Synthetic biology

  • Modeling, design and construction of synthetic biological networks
  • methods for reverse engineering of multicomponent biological networks
  • Optimization and optimality in life science problems
  • Minimal cell design

Systems biology

  • Analysis and simulation of gene regulatory networks
  • Signal transduction cascades
  • Synchronization phenomena at the cellular and subcellular level
  • Dynamical modeling, analysis and identification of biological networks at different scales of organization, both spatial and temporal
  • Optogenetics techniques

The financial sponsors of LSL are Circuits & Systems Society, Control Systems Society, Engineering in Medicine & Biology Society, and the Life Sciences Technical Community.