Thanks to the tremendous efforts of editors, we selected many excellent papers for publication last year, from over 800 submissions. As the Editor-in-Chief, I hope for continuous growth of JPR in the coming years. In terms of Impact Factor, we have reached a record high of 2.629 in 2020. We will do our best to keep JPR as a high-impact journal in 2022. More importantly, we want JPR to be more friendly and valuable to both readers and contributors than ever before. We hope that our readers will continue to support us as we aim to be a journal that contributes to basic plant science by fulfilling the role of JPR as clearly stated in the aims and scope of JPR, which was reorganized last April, as "The Journal of Plant Research is an international journal dedicated to the dissemination of fundamental knowledge in all areas of basic plant sciences." Also we ask contributors to note that "Papers that are purely descriptive with no clear hypothesis are not suitable for this journal. Manuscripts in the area of applied plant sciences, such as agricultural or medicinal research, are accepted only if the manuscripts contribute to basic plant sciences." (https:// www. sprin ger. com/ journ al/ 10265/ aims-and-scope).We published two JPR symposium issues last year; "Beyond Fibonacci Patterns and the Golden Angle: Phyllotactic Variations and their Cellular Origin" (Yin and Kitazawa 2021), and "Imaging, Screening and Remote Sensing of Photosynthetic Activity and Stress Responses" (Kohzuma et al. 2021). This year we will publish a JPR symposium issue entitled "Regulation of Cyclic Electron Flow, A to Z" edited by guest editors, Drs. Hiroko Takahashi and Ginga Shimakawa. We hope many readers will be interested in this new JPR symposium issue.