Editorial

Milestones in Gene Expression

Nature Milestones are a series of special supplements that aim to highlight the 'milestones' or remarkable achievements in a given field. Each Milestone is covered in a short article, written by Editors from the Nature Publishing Group, that discusses landmark papers and frames these classic findings in the context of prevailing concepts at the time that they were published and their reception by the community.

Milestones in Gene Expression — the third instalment in the series that includes Milestones in Cell Division and Milestones in Development — covers historic discoveries made in this area over the past 50 years. This Milestones issue is a collaboration between six Nature Publishing Group journals — Nature, Nature Cell Biology, Nature Genetics, Nature Reviews Genetics, Nature Reviews Molecular Cell Biology and Nature Structural & Molecular Biology.

Gene expression is a broad topic comprising not only transcriptional control but also post-transcriptional regulation, and has yielded multiple ground-breaking findings in the past decades. A single Milestones issue could not do adequate justice to a topic so diverse and therefore, in this issue, we have decided to focus on transcription, chromatin and epigenetic regulation. The Milestones covered here were chosen in collaboration with a panel of over 30 advisors who provided a list of significant discoveries and papers in their fields and input on the Milestone articles. These articles are by no means intended to be a comprehensive coverage of a particular discovery but instead aim to highlight the key papers. In addition to the Milestone articles, the supplement includes a Milestones Timeline that is a chronology of the key events, and a Collection of selected reviews and perspectives from participating journals.

The Milestones website includes additional features such as the advisors' biographies and an NPG library containing relevant content from the participating titles. A free Digital Edition of the print supplement can be downloaded from the web site. There are limited numbers, so we would encourage you to download one as soon as possible. We hope that Nature Milestones in Gene Expression will be an enriching reflection on the history of this field for the expert and novice alike.

Finally, we would like to extend our sincere thanks to the advisors and to acknowledge support from Applied Biosystems, Agendia BV, March of Dimes and the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation. As always, Nature Publishing Group takes complete responsibility for the editorial content.