The aftermath of the festive season leaves many of us feeling in need of a face-lift, and as Nature Reviews Molecular Cell Biology recently celebrated its fifth birthday, we've combated the effects of ageing with a makeover. As you'll see, the journal has undergone a redesign and we hope you approve of our transformation.

We start 2006 with several articles on the subject of membrane biology. On page 9, Joshua Zimmerberg and Michael M. Kozlov discuss how, using the geometry and physics tools of membrane biophysics, we can determine the structural and energetic requirements of lipids and proteins that enable them to work together to generate the membrane shapes seen, for example, during intracellular trafficking. Clathrin–clathrin-adaptor coats function in many steps of intracellular transport and, in a Review on page 32, Melissa A. Edeling, Corinne Smith and David Owen describe the structural data on clathrin and the AP adaptor protein complexes that have improved our understanding of the mechanisms of clathrin-coated-vesicle assembly and disassembly. Finally, in a Timeline article on page 63, Michael G. Roth discusses our knowledge of clathrin-mediated endocytosis before the development of fluorescence technology. Many of the concepts for how clathrin-mediated endocytosis functions actually came from the clever interpretation of simple observations.

Accompanying this month's issue is Nature Milestones in Gene Expression, which was produced with generous support from Applied Biosystems, Agendia BV, March of Dimes and the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation. This supplement celebrates almost 50 years of discoveries in the field of transcription and chromatin, and it can be found online at http://www.nature.com/milestones/geneexpression together with further related articles and features.