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As mentioned in an earlier editorial by my predecessor Alexey Ladokhin (Ladokhin 2023), I have taken over as Editor-in-Chief of The Journal of Membrane Biology from this year. Thanks to the hard work of Alexey (with crucial support from Sandro Keller) and the entire Editorial Board of JMBi, the journal has performed well despite the pandemic. Various parameters related to journal health have improved, and this is surely good news. However, the continuing challenge of maintaining a specialized journal such as JMBi is still upon us. How are we going to navigate this journey in these challenging times? Well, the future is always hard to predict, but we have started this year on a positive note.

We are happy to initiate this year a Special Issue (Collections) on the theme of “Role of Membranes in the Pore-formation Mechanism of Pore-forming Proteins and Toxins” for which the initial responses are encouraging. We are working actively for more Collection topics (including Conference issues) for JMBi. In addition, in our continuing effort to broaden our Editorial Board, keeping in mind geographic and gender diversity, we have already added five new Editorial Board Members this year: Ronald Clarke (Australia), Francisco Barrera (USA), Erwin London (USA), Thorsten Wohland (Singapore) and Irena Levitan (USA). We welcome them to the JMBi family, and believe JMBi will rise to new heights with their association. Contemporary membrane biology is intrinsically interdisciplinary in nature. We hope to capture this dynamism in future pages of JMBi. We need support of the international membrane biology community for this. Let us hope that with such support, we will be able to act like a vital cog in the global wheel of membrane biology research.