In mid-2007, Amanda Nottke, a PhD student in Harvard Medical School's pathology department was helping her advisor write up a grant application. They wanted to study a Caenorhabditis elegans protein they thought could model a mammalian enzyme called LSD1, which regulates histone structure. Other potential C. elegans homologues had been identified, but Nottke suspected that their protein, which she declined to name, had the closest sequence similarity to the mammalian version.












