The Active Lives of Lipid Metabolites

Sir,
I would like to make a comment on how Jerold Chun describes the way he cloned the VZG-1 receptor in his article "How the Lysophospholipid got its receptor" (the Scientist September 2007).
Although it might sound more brilliant to quote, as he does on page 50, a "strategy emulating that of [the Nobel prize winners] Linda Buck and Richard Axel", people in the field know that this strategy was devised by Libert et al in 1989*, two years before the paper by Buck and Axel describing the olfactory receptors. Although the Libert et al paper was inadequately not quoted in the original publication by Buck and Axel, Linda Buck clearly acknowledged having been inspired by it in a historical account of her work written in Cell after she received the Prize** (....That year [in 1989], it was shown for the first time that degenerate oligonucleotide primers could be used in PCR reactions to uncover new members of protein families, including GPCRs (Libert et al.,1989) [and tyrosine kinases] ; Wilks, 1989).

I have thought that your readership might be interested to know the true origin of this strategy, which has been used since by innumerable scientists and, accordingly, quoted more than 500 times.

Yours sincerely,

Pr J.E. Dumont,
Universite Libre de Bruxelles (ULB),
Institute of Interdisciplinary Research (IRIBHM),
Faculty of Medicine, Campus Hospital Erasme,
B 1070 Brussels, Belgium.

*Libert, F., M. Parmentier, A. Lefort, C. Dinsart, J. Van Sande, C. Maenhaut, M.J. Simons, J.E. Dumont, and G. Vassart (1989). Selective amplification and cloning of four new members of the G protein-coupled receptor family. Science 244:569-572.
** LB Buck The Search for Odorant Receptors. Cell S116, S117-S119. Jan