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In the early 2000s, Stefano Schiaffino, a muscle physiologist at the University of Padova in Italy, was faced with puzzling results: two seemingly identical experiments involving hind leg muscles in rats had yielded different findings.
Schiaffino and his team were investigating nuclear factor of activated T cells (NFAT), a transcription factor that responds to the level of muscle activity. Despite using similar procedures, the researchers found that in the tissues from one set of animals, NFAT had moved from the cytoplasm into the nucleus in a large proportion of cells, while in tissues from another experiment, this change had not occurred.
The explanation for this difference turned out to be simple: timing. The researcher responsible for one trial had sacrificed the nocturnal animals in the evening, while another had conducted the same procedure for the second trial in the morning. This meant that ...
