This month, Nature Reviews Molecular Cell Biology explores some of the essential characteristics of nature — life, death and (perhaps to more aesthetic souls) beauty.

We start off, appropriately, with life. To stay alive, organisms must respond to the surrounding environment. And for plants, this means light. To survive, they have had to generate a remarkable range of sensory systems to detect and respond to their main source of biochemical energy. On page 85, Peter Quail describes how photoreceptors called phytochromes are involved in transducing light signals. Progress in identifying the molecular and functional roles of phytochromes is opening up new directions, some of which are persuading researchers to re-examine long-held concepts.

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