If patience is a virtue, then Daniel Goodenough and Bruce Stevenson earned their wings in the pursuit of the first tight junction protein. Stevenson spent seven years as a graduate student with Goodenough (Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA) before the two worked out the conditions to purify fragile tight junction–enriched preparations from mouse liver (Stevenson and Goodenough, 1984).
It was enough to jump-start the field of tight junction biochemistry, some 20 years after the first morphological description of these junctions, which give epithelial cells their ability to seal off body compartments (Farquhar and Palade, 1963). The preparations yielded multiple protein bands—two major and six minor.
Stevenson took the project with him to Mark Mooseker's lab at Yale University (New Haven, CT) as a postdoc and collaborated with Janet Siliciano in the Goodenough lab. Using the tight junction fraction, they screened monoclonal antibodies by looking for...
