I apologise for the rather late arrival of this issue of Weeds World onto the electronic newstand. The last few weeks have been a busy time for conferences, so it has been hard to collate all the many contributions that this issue carries.

Thank you to all of the people who have contributed to this issue, particularly to the chairpersons from the 6th International Arabidopsis Meeting at Madison who kindly wrote a resume of the various sessions. Hopefully this will capture the flavour of the meeting for those who were not fortunate enough to be able to attend and be a wonderful overview for everyone.

New to this issue is a feature which has been added to make this a more interactive publication. Editorial comment on either the articles published here or on the various issues that are affecting the community can now be made through the use of a form which is mailed to the editor. Comments will be linked to articles or added to a new section which will be created called "letters to the editor". This will be an opportunity to voice opinions, ask questions and debate issues. This means that each issue of Weeds World can change significantly over time as comments are updated in a dynamic fashion to each of the mirror sites, so keep checking back to watch for developments.

If you do print off a hard copy please feel free to circulate it amongst your colleagues, especially if they do not have access to the Internet. The best results will be obtained by printing from the World Wide Web, but a plain text version of the Newsletter is also available by ftp from NASC.