Katharine Barnes, who launched the journal back in 2006, has moved on to a new role at Communications Medicine. Katharine was the Chief Editor of Nature Protocols from 2006 to 2009, before stepping down to the part-time role of Managing Editor. Although we were sad to see her go, we are excited to welcome Andrew Economou, who has been covering our stem cell and developmental biology content since January. Andrew came to us from the Francis Crick Institute, where he studied signaling interactions in zebrafish embryos. His previous postdoc at King’s College London focused on spatial patterns of gene expression in mammalian oral epithelium.

At the end of 2021, we also said a fond farewell to Colleen Loynachan. Our biomaterials and biophysics content is now covered by Rosy Favicchio, who joined us in March. Rosy has a PhD in molecular imaging from the University of Portsmouth and the Foundation for Research and Technology — Hellas, plus experience as a Research Fellow in the Department of Surgery and Cancer at Imperial College London, and as an editor at Nature Biomedical Engineering.

With the addition of Andrew and Rosy, we now have a full team of six editors again. Bronwen Dekker and Hannah Clark were founding members, helping Katharine to launch the journal. Bronwen completed a PhD in radiochemical targeting and imaging at the Paterson Institute for Cancer Research, followed by a postdoc at St Bartholomew’s hospital. She handles most of our chemistry, proteomics, lipidomics and metabolomics protocols. Hannah obtained a Masters degree from the University of Oxford, followed by a PhD in equine parasitology at the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine. Her areas of expertise include microbiology, molecular biology and gene editing. Ivanka Kamenova joined the journal in 2018, following a PhD at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Centre and a postdoc studying protein complex assembly using genomics and single-molecule imaging methods at the Institute of Genetics, Molecular and Cellular Biology in Strasbourg. She mostly handles our genetics, genomics and bioinformatics protocols.

The team is led by Mel Clyne, who joined the journal in 2014. Mel completed a PhD and postdoc at the Genome Damage and Stability Centre, University of Sussex. She then worked for Map of Medicine, drafting treatment guidelines for the National Health Service (NHS) in the UK. Mel was an editor on Nature Reviews Urology before taking up the position at Nature Protocols. During her time as Chief Editor, the scope of the journal has expanded to include clinical protocols and chemistry protocols without a biological application. The journal has also launched several new article types, including Protocol Extensions, Consensus Statements (for example, for Comet Assay reporting)1, and two types of Review called Tutorials and Comparative Analyses. Protocol Extensions describe an adaptation of an existing Nature Protocols protocol that substantially modifies the technique or offers additional applications. The Reviews we publish are either surveys of different methodological approaches (Comparative Analyses) or discussions of experimental design considerations for using a particular technology or technique (Tutorials).

As well as training two new editors this year, we also helped to produce a Nature Masterclasses course called ‘Experiments: From Idea to Design’, updated our genome editing collection, contributed to a workshop on methods reporting organized by the Joint Research Centre of the European Commission, and ran workshops associated with the Falling Walls Science Summit in Berlin. We published protocols for prime editing2, ATAC-seq3, cancer vaccine delivery4, selective organ-targeting5, sci-RNA-seq6 and metabolomic data processing using NOREVA and MetaboAnalyst 5.0 (refs. 7,8), as well as Reviews on electronic laboratory notebooks and CRISPR in vivo screens9,10. The year 2022 was a difficult year in many ways, but it was a good year for Nature Protocols and we are excited to welcome in 2023.