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As New Year’s resolutions fall by the wayside and 2010 begins to feel like a distant memory we take a look at the F1000 Posters Editor’s choice selection of the top three posters to grace the F1000 Posters site last year.

Novel mechanism for long-term memory?

Next time you ransack your home looking for that “safe place” where you left your keys, spare an expletive for HDAC3. In our ‘most viewed’ poster of 2010, Susan McQuown and colleagues at the University of California specifically highlight a novel role for histone deacetylase 3 (HDAC3)—one of the most highly expressed HDACs in the brain—as a negative regulator of long term memory formation. Karl-Peter Giese, of King’s College London, notes in his evaluation that this may be a novel mechanism that could be used in future to pharmacologically enhance memory.

Nonrandom sex in plants

Robert Swanson and colleagues from Valparaiso University, Chile, performed pollen competitions by pollinating Arabidopsis thaliana flowers with anthers from the Colombia ecotype of Arabidopsis thaliana and anthers from competing pollen. The resulting seeds were then assayed for paternity to demonstrate that Arabidopsis thaliana mates non-randomly. Sheila McCormick who evaluated the poster concludes ‘Columbia pollen won the race against some ecotypes but lost against others.’ As if dating wasn’t hard enough already!

Early biomarkers of stroke severity

Predicting the development of a lesion after transient cerebral ischemia (TIA)—a reduction in cerebral blood supply—can be a real challenge. However, the last poster in our selection, from Hongxia Lei, demonstrates the identification of early biomarkers of transient ischemic attack—within 3 hours—in an aim to improve prediction of lesion development which in turn ‘…could provide critical information for the evaluation and diagnosis in stroke and TIA patients’. Johannes Boltze and Michael Moskowitz evaluating this poster propose that since the highest field strength in magnets available for human patients is 7 Tesla and the magnet used in this experiment was an experimental 14.1 Tesla, ‘it would be interesting to assess the predictive power and practicability of the method at lower field strengths.’