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Front cover illustration

'Bacterial snowflakes: Kepler's seasonal gift'. The cover illustration shows snowflake-shaped colonies of a pure culture of a bacterium growing on an agar plate. Image courtesy Mr Lester Crothers, Northern Ireland Public Health Laboratory (NIPHL), Department of Bacteriology, Belfast City Hospital. In 1611, Johannes Kepler, a German cosmologist, philosophically attempted to identify the nature of the shape of the snowflake's six-cornered configuration - a ubiquitous shape within nature. Bacterial cells growing within complex community structures may engage in cross-talk between cells and between colonies of cells (quorum sensing), leading to sophisticated community behaviour. This often leads to complex macroscopic organization of cells and colony structure, as seen in the illustration (Dr John Moore, NIPHL, Belfast City Hospital).