How do you construct a channel between cells? The first step in answering this question was to isolate the components of one type of channel—the gap junction. Daniel Goodenough had been pursuing gap junction proteins since his days as a graduate student in the mid-1960s with Jean-Paul Revel, who helped discover the structures (Revel and Karnovsky, 1967; see “Defining gap junctions” JCB 169:379). In 1972, Goodenough demonstrated that gap junctions could be purified biochemically (Goodenough and Stoeckenius, 1972). By the mid-1970s, when Goodenough had his own lab at Harvard Medical School (Boston, MA), the field was struggling with spotty antibodies in its efforts to identify which proteins were forming the junctions.
An anticonnexin antibody stained only junctional plasma membranes.
PAUL
