Tim Nott has youthful memories of watching science TV programs such as Horizon on the BBC, where he saw researchers looking at life at the microscopic and molecular level. “Everything around you, even if it looks mundane like a puddle of dirty water, it’s got amazing biological things going on inside it,” he recalls realizing.
As a PhD student in Steve Smerdon’s lab at the National Institute for Medical Research in London in the mid-2000s, Nott was interested in protein structure and using x-ray crystallography to reveal it. But the proteins he worked on didn’t crystallize. The reason for this, it turned out, was that in addition to domains with a well-defined, 3-D structure, the proteins contained regions that were highly flexible. And he began to realize that many proteins contain such regions, which interact with folded areas in largely overlooked ways.
When Nott began a postdoc in Tony Pawson’s ...
