Many of us are undoubtedly already looking forward to the holiday season. However, before taking a well deserved break to reflect on the past year and set new goals for the future, cell biologists from all over the world will meet in San Diego, USA, for the 46th annual meeting of the American Society of Cell Biology. If you travel to San Diego, make sure you stop by the Nature Publishing Group (NPG) booth to pick up a sample copy of your favourite cell biology title and chat to NPG editors. And there's more.

If you enjoyed our Focus on Systems Biology: A User's Guide in the November issue, don't miss out on this month's podcast, which features a round-table discussion with systems biology experts and short interviews with students and postdocs working in the systems biology field. For insights into the challenges that systems biology research is faced with, and for information on funding, education and how to get published, access the podcast free online (http://www.nature.com/focus/systemsbiologyuserguide) or listen to it at the NPG booth in San Diego.

With this issue, you will find a poster on the molecular mechanisms that define stem-cell identity and fate, produced in collaboration with our sister journal Nature Reviews Cancer with generous support from Abcam. The poster, authored by Fiona M. Watt and Kevin Eggan, provides an overview of distinct embryonic and adult stem-cell types, and lists signalling molecules and transcription factors that define stem-cell fate as well as markers that have been used to identify different embryonic cell types (http://www.nature.com/nrm/poster/stemcell). The elucidation of the factors that regulate stem-cell identity and fate has important biomedical applications.