For authors

The Ukrainian Biochemical Journal (UBJ) publishes works in English only.

Please note that papers in The Ukrainian Biochemical Journal are published free of charge, and their full texts are available online, open access.

The UBJ uses the Comet editorial system for manuscript handling, including peer reviews and communication with authors. To sign up and/or submit your manuscript, click on the link below (we recommend that you would thoroughly familiarize yourself with DIRECTIONS FOR AUTHORS before beginning submission).

Submit online

DIRECTIONS FOR AUTHORS

The UBJ Editorial Board will consider publication of original experimental works; reviews of present-day problems of biochemistry; methodological works with a description of new or improved methods of biochemical investigations; papers on the history of biochemical science that elucidate the evolution of ideas, the origin and development of scientific schools, or portray researchers; discussion papers; reviews of new books; and scientific chronicles. The UBJ also publishes works from various allied sciences, such as cell and molecular biology, bioorganic chemistry, biophysics, pharmacology, medical biochemistry, and genetics, provided these works used biochemical methods and discuss biochemical findings.

For a manuscript to be accepted for consideration, it must meet the following basic criteria:

1. Be an original work that has not been published;
2. Be a scientific novelty;
3. Fall within the scope of the journal;
4. Be structured and formatted as required below.

Manuscript submission
• Upload your manuscript as a Microsoft Word file (.docx, .doc or .rtf) and the following documents in PDF format: (i) a License Agreement on copyright transfer to the publisher – a scanned copy, and (ii) a Conflict of Interest Disclosure Form. The License Agreement before scanning should be duly signed by all the authors.
NOTE: All the tables, figures, charts, photos, etc. should be part of your manuscript embedded in the text as appropriate. You will not be able to upload them separately.

The forms to download:

License-Agreement (pdf)

License-Agreement (docx)

Conflicts of Interest (pdf)

• The information about authors should include the first and last names of each author, his/her scientific degree, title, and affiliation (institution, department, and postal address), and email. The corresponding author’s name should be indicated and his/her contact (work and mobile) telephone number provided.

Format
• File format for text and tables: MS Word document (doc, docx or rtf). Use the Times New Roman font (font size 14 for the body, and 10 for tables); line spacing 1.5.

• Although figures, photographs, schemes, etc. may be either black-and-white or color, the preference should be given to color illustrations.

• The caption should not be part of a figure.

• Tables should be titled and numbered. All columns in a table should be named and filled with data. Notes are placed immediately below tables.

• Up to six figures will be acceptable for reviews and experimental papers, and up to four for brief reports.

• If the manuscript contains any illustration(s) published by other authors, the manuscript authors are required to furnish the UBJ Editorial Board with a duly executed permit of the copyright owner to use the illustration(s).

Bioethical norms

The UBJ follows guidelines and recommendations of the European Convention for the protection of vertebrate animals used for experimental and other scientific purposes (Strasbourg, 1986), the International Committee of Medical Journals Editors (ICMJE) (www.icmje.org), as well as “Bioethical appraisal of preclinical and other scientific research conducted on animals” (Kyiv, 2006). All procedures that describe experiments involving laboratory animals and any works using materials obtained from donors or patients should be conducted in compliance with the norms of bioethics. When describing experiments with animals, it is necessary to indicate the animal handling recommendations (national, institutional) that were followed during the experiments. In case when full adherence to these norms is impossible, the author should substantiate the changes in the protocol, have them approved by the local Committee on Bioethics, and specify the changes in the Materials and Methods section of the manuscript.

Manuscript size and structure

The experimental work volume, including references, tables, and figures should not exceed 20 pages A4 (40,000 characters with spaces), and that of reviews, 30 pages (60,000 characters with spaces).

The manuscript structure

• UDC (Universal Decimal Classification)
• The paper title
• The author’s (authors’) surname(s) and initials
• The Institution and Department where the work has been done
• E-mail for correspondence
• Structures summary and keywords
• Introduction
• Materials and methods
• Results and discussion
• Conclusions
• Acknowledgments
• Data on financial support
• References

• Summary

No more than 250 words, including:

– The relevance of the work urgency, its purpose, methods, results, and conclusions;
– Keywords (up to 10 words).

• Introduction.

The paper begins with a brief history of the problem with reference to sources and substantiation of the research objectives.

• Materials and Methods

This section should present a description of the methods used, reagents, and experiment conditions in such a way that the experiment could be reproduced. The methods and/or techniques should be described only if they are distinguished by novelty or are of interest from the viewpoint of this work. The names of producers of the reagents and materials used in the experiments should be specified, as well as the countries of origin. The number and species of the used animals, as well as the methods of anaesthetization and euthanasia, should be also specified.

Digital data should be rounded in accordance with generally accepted rules, allowing for the average experiment error. The value difference authenticity should be substantiated by statistical analysis, citing the concrete methods. The same results should not be presented in Tables and Figures. The author should indicate the program used for statistical analysis of the results, presentation of results, confidence interval or distribution of values.

All the designations and denominations of physical and chemical units of measurement should be given in the SI system. Amino acids are designated by three Latin letters.

The enzymes being used in the work, their recommended or systematic name and cipher should be given following recommendations of the International Biochemical Society (Enzyme Nomenclature – Acad. Press. San Diego. California and Supplement (1-6) in Eur. J. Biochem. (1993-1997, 1999), http://www.chem.qmul.ac.uk/iubmb/enzyme). The enzyme activity should be expressed through the rate of the catalyzed reaction in µM of the transformed substrate for 1 min per 1 mg of protein. Sometimes, two more units of enzymatic activity are used, the standard unit of activity U (IU) and catal (cat), to simplify the transition to the SI system. Specific enzyme activity is usually expressed in µM/min per 1 mg of protein or in un.act./mg, cat/kg (R. M. C. Dawson, D. C. Elliott, W. H. Elliott, K. M. Johnes. Biochemist’s Guide. – Moscow: Mir, 1991. – 543 p.). In all cases, the reaction conditions are specified, i.e. temperature, pH, substrate concentration.

When a particular organism (animals, plants, microorganisms) used in the research is mentioned for the first time, its full species name in Latin (italicized) should be provided, following modern taxonomy; after that the genus name should be denominated by one letter, except for the cases when genus names of different organisms begin with the same letter. Then, abbreviations of several letters are used, e.g., Staph. aureusStr. lactis.

Abbreviations, except for generally known ones, should not be given in Tables and Figure legends (with rare exceptions and then their interpretation in notes is obligatory). It is recommended arbitrarily abbreviating words, especially they are not long. E.g., no point to abbreviate such words as peroxidase, glucosidase, etc.

• Results and Discussion

Avoid duplicating the table data in the text. The discussion of results should be limited to the most important facts established. In other words, most part of the discussion should be devoted to results interpretation.

• Conclusions

It may include recommendations, estimations, and proposals.

• References

References are listed in the order of appearance in the text (where they are denominated by digits in square brackets). References should include the names of all authors of the paper, the full title of the paper, the abbreviated title, the volume and number of the journal, and page numbers in the journal. The titles of books (monographs, collected works, etc.) should be presented in full. References must not contain any hyperlinks and/or URL.  Works of recent years should prevail in references. Autors are to add DOI links (when available) to the reference list. 

References to any non-published materials are not acceptable.

The authors are fully responsible for the accuracy of references.

Examples of References

  1. Maksymchuk OV, Bezdrobna LK, Sidorik LL, Kiseleva OK, Chaschyn MO. Cytochrome P450 2E1 expression in mice liver under exposure of continuous and acute γ-radiation. Ukr Biokhim Zhurn. 2008; 80(4): 59-65. (In Ukrainian).
  2. Kibirev VK, Osadchuk TV, Kozachenko OP, Kholodovych V, Fedoryak OD, Brovarets VS. Synthesis, biological evaluation and docking of novel bisamidinohydrazones as NON-peptide inhibitors of furin. Ukr Biochem J. 2015; 87(1): 55-63.
  3. Lugovskoy EV. The Molecular Mechanisms of Fibrin Formation and Fibrinolysis. K.: Nauk. Dumka, 2003. 219 p. (In Russian).
  4. Demchenko AP. Introduction to Fluorescence Sensing / Springer. 2nd ed. 2015, XXXI, 794 p.
  5. Liu Q, Ponnuraj K, Xu Y, Ganesh VK, Sillanpaa J, Murray BE, Narayana SVL, Hoo M. The Enterococcus faecalis MSCRAMM ACE binds its ligand by the Collagen Hug model. J Bio. Chem. 2007; 282: 19629-19637.
  6. Hindorff LA, MacArthur J, Morales J, Junkins HA, Hall PN, Klemm AK, Manolio TA. A Catalog of Published Genome-Wide Association Studies. Available at http://www.genome.gov/gwastudies (accessed, September, 2012).

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