Postdoctoral researcher Skirmantas Kriaucionis sat at the computer in the lab of molecular biologist Nathaniel Heintz at the Rockefeller University in New York, looking at an unidentified spot that hung mysteriously on the screen in front of him. He had been watching as, line by line, the scanned image of separated neuronal nucleotides took shape. Fifteen minutes later, the image was complete, but the picture was less clear than ever.
He immediately started repeating the experiment, reproducing the same result until he had convinced himself that the spot was real, and not just a mistake or an artifact of botched methodology. When Heintz came by his bench to see how the experiment was progressing, Kriaucionis showed him the unexpected results (Science, 324: 929–30, 2009).
Tips for Wide-scale Epigenetic Detection
“As soon as I saw the spot, I thought it was important and interesting, ...
