Research in the field of life science is moving forward at a high pace.Science China Life Sciences is trying to reflect this trend as much as possible by publishing research articles of notable original discoveries.Here I am attempting to highlight some of the novel discoveries as reported in this journal in the year 2011,a collection of the covers for the 12 issues are displayed in Figure 1.It is my hope that the retrospective summary presented here will help readers to gain an interest in this journal that was once highly prestigious at least for Chinese scientists to publish and to read.