We present two volumes of the Current Topics in Microbiology and Immunology devoted to work on DNA methylation. Although the 25 contributions appearing herein are by no means the proceedings of the Weissenburg Symposium on DNA Methylation held in May 2004, many of the authors of the current volumes and of the speakers at the symposium are the same; additional authors were invited later. The authors have been asked not to write a summary of their talks at the symposium but rather to outline their latest and most exciting discoveries and thoughts on the topic. The editors gratefully acknowledge the contributors’ esprit de corps of enthusiasm and punctuality with.