much missed by both her fellow editors and Development 's staff, and no doubt by the many authors whose papers she had shepherded through the publication process. We are extremely fortunate and delighted, therefore, to have Professor Geraldine Seydoux, from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine (Baltimore, MD, USA), join Development as our new C. elegans editor. Geraldine is best known for her work on germline specification in C. elegans . She is particularly interested in the early critical decisions that determine whether cells become somatic body cells or germline cells. You may have already noticed one of our other key developments for 2011: our new Technical paper category. We are introducing this section because we believe that papers that describe a novel technique of broad interest to the community of developmental biologists are relevant to the readers of Development . Thus, we plan to publish in this new section both research articles and research reports describing new methods that provide a significant new resource to the developmental biology community. We expect papers in this section to describe the method and its particular application to a developmental biology problem. For more information on our guidelines on technical papers, please see our publication criteria page . Thus, there have been many changes to Development over the course of the past year, and also no doubt in the year to come: in 2010, we launched our newly redesigned website, as well as the Node, and placed