Issue Information

Front cover: Mochi (rice cake) is indispensable to welcome the New Year in Japan. To use mochi for various purposes such as for food and for ornament, people firstly pound a large mochi and then divide it into small pieces according to the purposes. This process may be similar to that of producing various types of cells from fertilized eggs by asymmetric cell divisions. The woman in the front is dividing a large mochi asymmetrically such that beans that look like Sara (Smad anchor for receptor activation) endosomes and Numb (a cell fate‐determining factor) are gathered only into the left half. The other woman on the back is preparing a decoration called mochi‐bana (rice‐cake flower). Note that she is trying to schematize a linage of stem cells and progeny. For drawing this image, we referred to Gonzalez (2015) Nature 528, 196‐197, DOI: 10.1038/528196a . Designed by TRAIS Co., Ltd. (Kobe, Japan).