As the end of the year approaches, many people find themselves reflecting on what the year has brought, and what their activities and achievements have been. At Nature Structural Biology, taking stock is important, because it allows us to examine our efforts and evaluate our goals in relation to the scientific community.

Without the fanfare over the big money for structural genomics, or the excitement of the high resolution structures of the ribosome, 2001 has been a relatively quiet year for structural biology. The community, however, continues to grow and thrive, and much progress has been made throughout the year. We are proud to have published some of the best work from this field in our journal.

Looking back at the papers published in Nature Structural Biology over the past 12 months, we see that they continue to cover a wide range of topics, from determining novel structures to estimating the scope of structural genomics, from designing protein structural elements to engineering folding pathways, and from monitoring fusion-competent peptide conformations to characterizing mitochondrial transport machinery.

Some of the papers derived significant conclusions from high resolution structure determination. For example, three papers1,2,3 described domain swapping in the structures of three fibril-forming proteins, two of which — human prion protein and cystatin C — are linked to human disease. These three structures together argue a strong case for possible involvement of domain swapping in the propagation of fibrils.

Details of functional or mechanistic insights, however, do not come from high resolution structures alone. In recognizing this, the editors at Nature Structural Biology launched a campaign to broaden the scope of the journal about two and half years ago. The results are clear: on average, ∼30% of the papers in each issue this year reported studies other than structure determination. Some of these pages discussed topics that are familiar to the readers of the journal, such as protein folding. Other papers examined the relationship between form and function of biomolecules using a variety of techniques, including molecular biological, biochemical and biophysical methods. For example, Takagi and colleagues4 used an engineered integrin construct to study how this class of proteins transmit signals from inside the cell; Sosa et al.5 used single molecule fluorescence to monitor the dynamics of the kinesin motor domain attached to the microtubule.

In addition to the papers that fall within the expanded scope, we are happy to report that an increasing number of papers published in the pages of Nature Structural Biology this year used a variety of tools to verify the immediate predictions and to complement the results from high resolution structures. For example, a paper by Sattler and coworkers6 used site-directed mutagenesis to map the DNA binding surface of the SAND domain. Further, they demonstrated that the DNA binding activities of the wild type and mutant proteins correlate with their activities in vivo.

This year, there are some significant changes in the journal, all of which have been implemented to provide information pertinent to the papers in a transparent and timely manner. As of May, 2001, we are asking all authors to release structural coordinates with no delay upon publication of their papers in the journal. In Ocotober, we joined Nature and other Nature research journals in asking the authors to declare competing finanical interests, if any, with the work to be published (for details of this policy, please visit http://www.nature.com/nature/submit/competing/index.html). Perhaps the most exciting and significant change is that we are now publishing online in advance of the print version (for information, please visit our website http://www.nature.com/nsmb/) with a weekly schedule. This exciting development allows us to rapidly provide interesting scientific discoveries to a broad audience.

Having taken the time to reflect, we are proud to say that we have made significant progress toward our goals, including providing more timely reviews and News and Views reports throughout the year. We are striving to maintain the quality and to further develop the journal. We would like to hear your feedback about the content and the editorial policies of the journal. Any suggestions and comments are welcome (please send by email to nsb@natureny.com).