It has been 2 years since this challenging period due to the pandemic started. The disruption caused by COVID-19 has probably been much stronger than any of us could have expected. The year 2021 was not easy despite some clear improvement in the overall condition around the world, mainly thanks to the tremendous work of the scientific community and companies in producing a range of vaccines quickly and the use of very simple and efficient protective measures such as wearing face masks indoors and outdoors, and social distancing.I want to start this editorial with a big thanks to the Association of Applied Biology (AAB: https://www.aab.org.uk) and Wiley (https:// www.wiley.com/en-us) for their support over the last 2 years. They did a tremendous job keeping everything going well and with full and continuous support. To our editors and reviewers who also did not drop the ball and managed to keep the high standard and efficiency of the entire publishing process. To our authors and all those who considered Annals as a vehicle to publish their research and ideas. Thanks also to you, our readers, who we hope are happy with the information we are publishing and are using it in your research and activities. It was another difficult year, but I believe we all did pretty well.Research continued to be affected in 2021, but the overall perception is that we all managed to do a bit better than in 2020. Many of us still had to do most of the work from home, but it has been amazing how the new communication alternatives made possible by tools such as Meet, Teams, Zoom, among others, so rapidly created a new positive and reliable scenario for online conferences, teaching, webinars and so on. Some hybrid events are already taking place, and slowly scientific activities are getting back to near normal.The year 2021 was also the year we lost a friend and extraordinary colleague, Prof. Simon Leather (Figure 1), who has been on the board of Annals since 2005 as a Senior Editor, and between 2015 and 2020 as the Editor-in-Chief. Simon passed away in September. It was