As the current team enters its third year of looking after JGP, it strikes me that while being Editor-in-Chief has been both stimulating and enjoyable, it has certainly been a very strange couple of years. As we were assuming our roles, COVID-19 began its transition into a global pandemic. At a parochial level, the full group of editors has not yet had a face-to-face meeting; we know each other best through our weekly calls. That business has continued as normal is in no small part due to the committed attitude of the Rockefeller University Press staff. Working from home, they have managed everything from submission to eventual publication.
We publish papers in all areas of general physiology and, indeed, are anxious to broaden the range of subjects covered. Special Issues provide a means to showcase existing areas of strength as well as to signpost new areas. Highlights of the past year include a Special Issue on myofilaments organized by Associate Editor Henk Granzier in collaboration with Editorial Advisory Board members Christine Cremo and Rick Moss (Cremo et al., 2021; Moss et al., 2021). 2022 will see Special Issues in the areas of Channels and Transporters in Immunity; Mechanotransduction by Membrane Proteins; and Excitation–Contraction Coupling.
A particular highlight of the JGP calendar is the announcement of the Cranefield Awards, named after Paul Cranefield, Editor-in-Chief from 1966 until 1995. These are awarded by a committee chaired by Alessio Accardi representing both JGP and the Society of General Physiologists, and celebrate the outstanding work of researchers at the various early stages of their careers.
The Cranefield Graduate Student Award has been awarded to Colline Sanchez from the Unversité Lyon, France. Working towards her PhD under the mentorship of Vincent Jacquemond, she used a novel calcium sensor, targeted to the junctional sarcoplasmic reticulum membrane to examine local changes of calcium concentration (Sanchez et al., 2021).
The Cranefield Postdoctoral Award was won by Fayal Abderemane-Ali for work carried out at the University of California, San Francisco with Daniel Minor and colleagues (Abderemane-Ali et al., 2021). This paper showed that the resistance to sodium channel toxins in birds and frogs that produce these toxins is not due to their channels being resistant to these toxins (Márquez, 2021).
The senior Cranefield Award, for someone at the start of their independent research career, has been awarded to Polina Lishko, from the University of California, Berkeley. Her work investigated the mechanism by which sex steroid hormones influence the choroid plexus and identified a role for progesterone in increasing an inwardly rectifying potassium current, Kir7.1 (Björkgren et al., 2021).
As well as the contributions from its authors, JGP is underpinned by the work of reviewers and members of the Editorial Advisory Board. We thank the following, whose terms have finished, for their contributions to the Editorial Advisory Board: Arun Anantharam, Thomas DeCoursey, David Fedida, Karen Fleming, Heedeok Hong, Ellen Lumpkin, Lorin Milescu, Mirela Milescu, Medha Pathak, and Dimitrios Stamou. It is also fitting to make special mention of the following members, who depart after service of 15–45 years: Stephen Cannon, William Catterall, Bertil Hille, Toshinori Hoshi, Ramon Latorre, and Karl Magleby.
