After finishing high school, Alina Vrabioiu travelled from Bucharest in Romania to the United States. There, she studied at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and quickly found success.

Just months after receiving a PhD in biology from Harvard, Vrabioiu, now a research fellow at Harvard Medical School, co-authored a Nature paper with her advisor, Tim Mitchison. He is well known for his work on cellular cytoskeletal dynamics.

Her project went surprisingly well, she says, allowing for a rare two-author paper in a field that often requires large teams of researchers. “The project was risky, but we were lucky,” Vrabioiu says. “It's rare to just think of a project and then find it works.”

Vrabioiu's paper describes the organization of filamentous septin proteins at the start of cytokinesis, the final stage of cell division in most eukaryotes (see page 466). The topic has long been controversial. By rigidly attaching a green-fluorescent-protein marker to yeast septins, then probing them with polarized light, Vrabioiu and Mitchison were able to look at the septin filaments in fine detail.

They found that the filaments form ordered structures and undergo a 90° rotation just before the onset of cytokinesis. Their results indicate that these proteins have a mechanical role in cell division.