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I have a clear memory of presenting my initial results about a “failed” protein at a lab meeting with my postdoctoral advisor Angus Lamond at the University of Dundee in Scotland and the rest of his group. It was the summer of 2000, and for the first few months of my postdoc I had been fusing green fluorescent protein with novel proteins that had recently been identified by mass spectrometry as residing in the nucleolus. I engineered HeLa cells to produce copious amounts of these fusion proteins, and watched where they went. Most migrated to the nucleolus, as expected, but one protein steadfastly refused. Instead, it formed nuclear dots that were much smaller than the large and obvious nucleoli.
I was really worried about the messiness of this result, but also intrigued. To my relief, instead of being disappointed that the protein was not doing what ...
