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Cover  Studies on flies have made important contributions to our understanding of the process of endocytosis. In 1964, Roth and Porter published a classic ultrastructural study of the uptake of yolk proteins by oocytes of the mosquito Aedes aegypti L. (Roth, T.F., and Porter, K.R. [1964]. J. Cell Biol. 20, 313-332). This study described internalization through coated pits at the cell surface and outlined subsequent steps in the pathway. An artist's rendition of their results is shown on the cover. The major protein of the vesicle coat, clathrin, was later isolated by Pearse (Pearse, B.M. [1975]. J. Mol. Biol. 97, 93-98) and has been the focus of a great deal of investigations. Later studies using genetics in Drosophila melanogaster isolated mutants that showed a reversible temperature-sensitive block in synaptic transmission. One of these mutants, shibire, was shown to accumulate collared coated pits at nonpermissive temperature (cover, Kosaka, T., and Ikeda, K. [1983]. Neurobiology 14, 207-225). Later studies showed that the defective gene encodes dynamin and that under certain conditions, in vitro and in vivo, dynamin can form these collars (Hinshaw, J.E., and Schmid, S.L. [1995]. Nature 374, 190-192; Takei, K., McPherson, P.S., Schmid, S.L., and De Camilli, P. [1995]. Nature 374, 186-190).Howard Riezman