As I pointed out in my first editorial earlier this year, my aim as an Editor is to serve as best I can the interests of the pigment cell research community. One way to do that is to have a website associated with Pigment Cell Research that provides access not only to the journal content, but which will also act as a resource for those of us who have an interest in pigment cells. You will no doubt recall the http://www.pigment.org website that was established and run by Vince Hearing during his tenure as editor of this journal that was for most of us the first port of call for accessing this journal. For a variety of reasons, it was decided that in future the site would best be managed and developed by the publisher of this journal with the overriding aim that this is not a site to be used simply to promote the commercial success of Pigment Cell Research, but rather that it be a wider resource and would complement the sites run by the various pigment cell societies. I am pleased to say that the new site is now up and running and available at the same http://www.pigment.org URL. The design has been kept as simple as possible and there are a number of features that might be of interest. In addition to the obvious requirement, that the contents of the current issue of Pigment Cell Research is available, we have also initiated some ‘virtual’ issues where with one click of a mouse all articles published recently on a specific subject are accessible irrespective of which issue they appear in. The initial virtual articles are on vitiligo and melanoma with brief forewords from Alain Taieb and Meenhard Herlyn, with the aim of attracting more readers from these fields. It is anticipated that more ‘virtual’ issues will appear with time. We have also included links to the pigment societies and highlighted various meetings that might be of interest. One additional feature is the Editor's page. This will enable me to place anything I feel is of interest directly onto the website and will be updated regularly. Over time this page may include, for example, comments on key papers published in the field, announcements of awards or anything else I think will be of interest. The first thing I have included is a brief guide to writing a manuscript – something I had been putting together for the students of my own institute, but which I realised might also be of some interest to both students and postdoctorals working on pigment cells in general. It is a personal view, is not exhaustive and for certain is missing many points, but nevertheless I feel it may be a useful guide to what may sometimes be a frustrating experience. I hope to be able to upgrade this commentary with some other useful aids directed at those who, like my own students, are not native English speakers. We have also included one other key resource, namely a gene array database generously contributed by Keith Hoek in Zurich, that details the results of an affymetrix array analysis of normal human melanocytes in culture. Two sets of data are provided from these cells are provided. In my case I have frequently wondered whether the gene I have recently become interested in is actually expressed in melanocytes or not. This resource should enable all of us to determine readily whether or genes of interest are indeed expressed in these cells. I also anticipate that further useful array data will be accessible as and when they become available. As I was a postdoctoral I have been working on transcription regulation and trying to understand how transcription factors are regulated and how they coordinate the programme of gene expression that underlies the identity of a cell lineage. And although over the past few years that interest has extended to signal transduction pathways, other things in the cytoplasm such as the cytoskeleton, and especially exotic membranous structures like the endoplasmic reticulum (ER), golgi, lysosomes and God forbid, melanosomes, have remained a black box. The nucleus is where I am most comfortable. Therefore, it is with some surprise that the world of the cytoplasmic dynamics architecture and that has excited so many of you for so long, now threaten to impinge ever so slightly on my nuclear universe. Naïve questions such as how does a cell know it has successfully made a melanosome or has transferred one successfully to a keratinocyte spring to mind. How do melanocytes know when to stop making melanosomes? Is it the duration and intensity of UV irradiation or is there a more subtle and sophisticated mechanism operating? The stimulating review by Schiaffino and Tacchetti in this issue highlights the fact that the OA1 gene product encodes a protein that has the properties of a G-protein coupled receptor that appears to be targeted to those cytoplasmic membranous entities, lysosomes and melanosomes. Indeed they speculate that OA1 could potentially signal from the melanosome and indeed might well play a role in regulating several aspects of melanosome biogenesis. Given its potential as to signal via camp, OA1 could in fact regulate the expression of Mitf, the transcription factor that in addition to its function in melanocyte development and cell cycle progression, plays a crucial role in regulating genes dedicated to melanin production and melanosome biogenesis. Mitf itself is the subject of intense scrutiny. Although at one stage it appeared that Mitf was a relatively straightforward transcription factor with a defined mode DNA-binding and ability to activate transcription, the more examination it is subjected to, the more of its previously secret life is revealed. Mitf expression is regulated by multiple transcription factors and signalling pathways and this degree of control at the transcriptional level is matched by an equally complex repertoire of post-translational modifications including phosphorylation by ERK2, RSK, p38, and GSK3 as well as ubiquitylation that act to regulate Mitf protein activity or turnover. Here Murakami and Arnheiter, as well as David Fisher's group in a paper published earlier this year in JBC, now show that Mitf is also modified by small ubiquitin-like modifier and that this modification regulates the capacity of Mitf to cooperate with other transcription factors in transcription regulation. They also speculate that, as with other transcription factors, one role of sumoylation may be to regulate the recruitment of specific co-factors that would mediate or modulate the ability of Mitf to regulate transcription. Accumulating evidence suggests that one possible co-factor for Mitf is the product of the retinoblastoma gene Rb that playas multi-faceted role in controlling many aspects of the cell cycle as well as in differentiation in many cell types. However precisely how Rb may influence melanocyte development and differentiation has not been widely examined, despite the interest in the loss of a functional Rb pathway in melanoma through inactivation of p16INK4a. The paper from Tonks et al. now makes a major step forward in this field by analysing the results from mice in which Rb is conditionally knocked out in the melanocyte lineage. The results indicate that there is no apparent in vivo defect in melanocyte development or in differentiation. However in vitro, Rb−/− melanocytes derived from these mice exhibit a number of growth and differentiation defects. The results and the Rb-negative cell lines should provide a major stimulus to the field. A journal's impact factor is, broadly speaking, a measure of the average number of citations per paper published in that journal. These days the impact factor can influence a wide range of scientific activities, from the choice of where to publish to decisions about funding of labs based on the quality of scientific output; the higher the impact of the journal, the more it is perceived to publish higher quality papers. It should be remembered though that impact of a journal reflects a wide range of variables that variously include the quality of papers published, the breadth of readership and, for specialist journals devoted to a specific area of research, the size of the field; the larger the numbers of labs working on a subject, the more likely papers from that field will be highly cited. Given that Pigment Cell Research tends to publish papers in a highly specific area it is remarkable that we can announce that for the first time in history the impact factor of this journal has now reached 3.0. This is no mean feat for a journal serving a relatively small field and reflects entirely the efforts if the previous Editor-in-chief Vince Hearing, as well as the editors, referees and all of you who publish and read the journal. I can only hope the strong support from the pigment cell community will continue to contribute to the success of the journal.