01/08/2026
Happy New Year, and a big thank you to everyone who voted in the Journal of Cell Biology's Cover of The Year competition. We are delighted to announce that the cover with the most votes was the May 2025 image provided by Vaisaly R. Nath, Padinjat Raghu, and colleagues at the National Centre for Biological Sciences-TIFR, Bangalore, India.
The cover shows a merged confocal microscopy image of an adult Drosophila eye, captured as part of Nath et al.'s study (https://hubs.la/Q03ZT4C20) demonstrating that, in Drosophila photoreceptors, Ca2+ influx through plasma membrane channels regulates membrane contact site density through extended synaptotagmin (dEsyt). The individual ommatidia that make up the compound eye are seen as repeating units. In each ommatidium, the expanded apical plasma membrane of the photoreceptor are folded into microvilli; seven rhabdomeres are seen per ommatidium. The image shows the localization of a calcium-binding mutant of dEsyt (cyan) along with the lipid transfer protein RDGB (green) and phalloidin-labelled F-actin (red).
We are grateful to all of our authors who submitted their outstanding work and beautiful images to the journal, and we look forward to publishing exciting research in the year ahead.
