Communication is at the heart of David Eisenberg's lab at the University of California, Los Angeles. Through meetings, seminars and an active journal club, his team members swap ideas both among themselves and with other groups at the university.

Interactions, this time involving proteins, also form the core of the lab's scientific work. The team's latest findings show how proteins can string themselves together into huge fibres (see page 266). Eisenberg stresses the importance of self-motivation in working at his lab. He seeks co-workers who want to “press out the frontiers of knowledge”, he says, and who are inherently curious about the fundamentals of protein interactions and their contributions to metabolism, as well as their failure in various diseases.

3 Number of papers from Eisenberg's lab published in Nature since 2000.

36 Number of years Eisenberg has led the lab.

1971 Year Eisenberg published his first paper from the lab (E. G. Heidner et al. Science 171, 677–679; 1971).

18 Number of graduate students and postdocs working full-time in Eisenberg's lab. The lab shares another seven staff, who look after equipment, with other structural-biology groups.