“Focus on what you think is exciting; in turn, recognise and accept help when it is offered.”

Serge Mostowy heads a lab at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, working on the molecular mechanisms underlying bacterial infection and the role of the cytoskeleton in cellular immunity. He shares the story behind his unexpected journey from a background in mathematics, through -omics, sequencing and microscopy to host–pathogen research, and how he has drawn inspiration at each stage from the scientists around him.

Catch up with early-career first authors in our First Person interviews. Recently, we spoke to Bhagawat C. Subramanian, Hannah Arbach, Sudeshna Nag and Patrick Cunningham.

Review – Where, how and why a cell eats itself to death

Shani Bialik, Santosh K. Dasari and Adi Kimchi review recent findings that demonstrate autophagy-dependent cell death in various contexts and begin to elucidate molecular mechanisms that render autophagy a lethal process.

Review – Failure is not an option

André Schneider and Torsten Ochsenreiter discuss recent discoveries regarding the unusual segregation system of the single-unit mitochondrial genome of T. brucei.

Meet the team

Meet the Journal of Cell Science team at conferences throughout October. Executive Editor Sharon Ahmad attends the ASMB meeting in Las Vegas and Reviews Editor Petra Gross will be at the EMBO workshop on ER function in health and disease in Lucca, Italy. Features & Reviews Editor Manuel Breuer will be at the FEBS 2018 Golgi meeting in Sorrento, Italy.

JCS Meeting – Cell dynamics: organelle-cytoskeleton interface

The second in our series of cell dynamics meetings now turns to organelles. This May 2019 meeting in Lisbon, Portugal, aims to bring together scientists studying the interface between organelles and the cytoskeleton at different scales and perspectives using a range of model systems. Find out more and apply for your place here.

Journal news – new fast-track decision process