The end of the year can mean having to keep an eye on our waistbands, and several articles in our final issue of 2007 touch upon this. The vast array of food on offer at this time of year can leave us feeling rather blimp-like, and Stephen L. Nutt and colleagues (page 923) reveal some new and surprising results about the role of another type of blimp — the transcriptional repressor B-lymphocyte-induced maturation protein 1 (BLIMP1) — in the final stages of lymphocyte maturation.
Perhaps we should be more picky when it comes to what we eat, and think about what signals a good meal. On page 964, Kodi S. Ravichandran and Ulrike Lorenz discuss this issue in terms of phagocyte engulfment of apoptotic cells. They focus on recent developments in this field, highlighting the 'find-me' and 'eat-me' signals that are expressed on apoptotic cells. One of these eat-me signals is phosphatidylserine, and in our Research highlights section we report on two papers published in Nature that have identified two phosphatidylserine receptors (page 917).
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