A numerical perspective on Nature authors.

As a senior lecturer at the University of Malta in Msida, Rena Balzan spends a good part of each day teaching medical genetics. The rest of her time is spent doing research. Balzan has a small lab with one post-graduate student. She works on mitochondrial targeting, and is currently interested in apoptosis in yeast. “I do the kind of work I do out of love for the subject and scientific research,” she says.

When Jerry Kaplan, a pathology professor at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City, came across Balzan's work, he invited her to work with his group on using yeast to study iron metabolism. The partnership — Balzan's first outside Europe — has been very successful. On page 96 of this week's issue, the group and their colleagues describe a new genetic tool for exploring disorders in iron metabolism.

1 is the number of authors working in Malta to publish original research in Nature over the past year.

201 is the number of visits to Nature online that have come from Malta in the past month (0.01% of all visits).

4 is the number of novels, in Maltese, that Rena Balzan has published in addition to her scientific publications.

11 is the number of countries in which authors publishing original research in this week's Nature live and work.