PLOS ONE 15 Year Anniversary: Staff Editors’ Favorites

Larivière and colleagues show that interdisciplinary research has greater impact in the long run, suggesting that it is greater than the sum of its disciplinary parts.

Ritter and Ferguson show that listening to happy music elicits higher levels of creativity, linking positive affect and arousal to traits of persistence and flexibility that facilitate creative thinking.

McLaren and colleagues uncover 13,000 year-old footprints on the west coast of Canada. The discovery of these footprints adds to the growing body of evidence that humans inhabited the Pacific coast of Canada during late Pleistocene times.

This study from Hallmann and colleagues demonstrated a 75% decline in insect biomass over 27 years in German nature areas. This paper became one of the most influential and highly-cited studies in Entomology in the last decade, attracting attention from hundreds of media outlets, and raising public awareness of insect declines. Since this publication many funding bodies have made allocations for projects related to insect declines and conservation.

Palm oil is the world’s most widely traded vegetable oil. As global demand grows, large areas of tropical forest are being converted into oil palm plantations. In this important work, Vijay and colleagues showed how palm oil expansion from Southeast Asia into new regions of the Americas and Africa increased greatly the risk of deforestation and threatened vulnerable biodiversity at risk of extinction. Since publication this work has gained over 100,000 views, has been cited in more than two hundred publications, and has been featured in multiple news outlets.

This study attempts to answer a fundamental biochemistry question — why all living organisms only need 20 amino acid residue types to carry out a repertoire of diverse functions. A combination of quantum chemical and chemoinformatic investigations suggest that this set of 20 suffices the need of incorporating molecular complexity while retaining important chemical functionalities and structural stability. Efforts to extend the repertoire of “amino acid structural space” led to no novel or useful functionalities, indicating that these 20 building blocks are selected on the principle of parsimony.

This study from Daniel Vogt and co-workers shows how, by using 3D printing and soft robotic manipulators, we can manipulate fragile and often old deep-sea organisms such as sea stars without damaging them.

James Hansen and colleagues assess the climate impacts of global warming using ongoing observations and paleoclimate data in this groundbreaking study from 2013. Their work served as an early warning on the continuing impact of fossil fuel emissions on Earth’s climate, and has been followed by countless related studies.

Royer and colleagues show that plastic pollution in the environment releases two common greenhouse gases under normal solar irradiation, studying both virgin and weathered plastics, and that this release may persist during an item’s lifetime. This research extends the focus of the detrimental effects of plastic pollution in the environment to possible climate impacts, in addition to direct effects on living organisms through entanglement, ingestion and the sorption of toxic chemicals. This study called for further research assessing the contribution of hydrocarbon release from plastic pollution to the global carbon budget.

This study from Daniele Fanelli was the first meta-analysis to investigate the frequency in which scientists falsify or fabricate data. The study concluded that self-reported or observed rates of misconduct are high, and suggested that the actual rate is likely to be higher than this. It was widely publicized in the popular media, and has attracted over 300,000 views since publication. In light of the so-called “replication crisis” within many scientific disciplines, this study and others like it really serve to highlight the importance of encouraging robust publication ethics and scientific practices.

This study from Lerner and co-workers demonstrated using cell culture and mouse models that flavoured electronic cigarettes used in vaping generate reactive oxygen species which cause inflammatory response, morphological changes and toxicity in lung tissue. This was one of the first studies to demonstrate the dangers of flavoured e-cigarettes.

In this study Chellappa and colleagues demonstrated that blue enriched light induces greater melatonin suppression, enhanced subjective alertness, faster cognitive reaction times (in attention focused tasks), in addition to improving well-being and visual comfort. This has important ramifications both for the workplace and in consideration of circadian rhythms

Using national data in the United States, Stanger-Hall and Hall demonstrate a correlation between abstinence-only sex education and increasing teenage pregnancy and birth rates

This study from Leonard and colleagues investigated the early steps in the pathophysiology of celiac disease (CD) by sc-RNA seq. The authors identified the upregulation of novel genes that are involved in the immune response machinery (IL-12RB1and IL-12RB2) and cell adhesion process in the mucosa (IGSF4 and ITGAM) and in the spliceosome pathway in subjects with active CD compared to those in remission, suggesting a potentil link between the microbiome, innate immune response, and the development of CD. The study also highlights novel possible targets for personalized therapies for disease intercetion (primary prevention) in genetically at-risk subjects.

Waqar, Asghar and Manzoor describe the use of liquid biopsy-based platelets mRNA signature for early diagnosis of hepatocellular carcinoma, and the use of mRNA as biomarkers for comparison of hepatic cirrhosis and hepatocellular carcinoma. The study could also help to elucidate some of the signalling pathways involved in progression of cirrhosis towards hepatocellular carcinoma.

Becquart and colleagues surveyed >10% of Gabon villagers for Zaire ebolavirus (ZEBOV)-specific IgG antibodies. They report overall seroprevalence of 15.3%, one of the highest reported at the time, and up to 33.8% in some villages. This is an interesting piece of epidemiology, published four years before the Western African Ebola virus epidemic shone a global spotlight on the virus. The study provides fascinating insights into human exposure to zoonotic diseases with epidemic potential.

In an attempt to bring the outdoors in, An and colleagues explore the impact of biophilic office designs on employee wellness. The authors found that sunlight exposure was positively associated with overall job satisfaction and organisational commitment.

In this experimental study, Gillen and colleagues showed that sprint interval training among sedentary men achieved the same beneficial effects of traditional endurance training, despite a five-fold lower exercise volume and time commitment. These effects included insulin sensitivity, cardiorespiratory fitness, and skeletal muscle mitochondrial content. This study could inform the design of time-efficient exercise interventions for the prevention and treatment of chronic diseases.