Editorial: Plant and Cell Physiology- Past, Present and Future

Welcome to another exciting year with Plant and Cell Physiology! We would like to take this opportunity to inform you about recent developments to the journal, followed by a taster of some of our upcoming features and special issues for the year ahead. Editorial updates We have introduced a number of changes to our instructions to authors, and so urge authors to consult our guidelines prior to manuscript submission to ensure a smoother all-round ex-perience. Note that as of this January, we will no longer be accepting manuscripts under the ‘Techniques Paper ’ category. While we are still keen to promote the development of new techniques and methodologies that aid plant research, authors should now publish these as an integral part of their findings, showing evidence for a significant advance in the relevant field when the new technique or improved method is applied. For instance, over the past few months we have published two reports demonstrating how development and customization of the increasingly popular gene editing tool, clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats (CRISPR)-associated endonuclease Cas9 system (CRISPR/Cas9) (recently reviewed by Osakabe and Osakabe 2015), can be used to produce stable mutants in liverwort through clonal propagation (Sugano et al. 2014), and for targeted mutagenesis of paralo-gous genes in rice using only one single-guide RNA to circum-vent the issue of functional redundancy that is often associated with multi-paralagous genes in plants (Endo et al. 2014). Recognising excellence in plant science PCP is dedicated to the dissemination of groundbreaking sci-ence. To this aim, each month the Editor-in-Chief selects one outstanding article to be made freely available for download. The collection of Editor-in-Chief’s Choice articles can be viewed a