Frances Brodsky: So you think you know all about clathrin?

M ention clathrin and what fi rst comes to mind is probably the protein's famous role in designating and constructing endocytic sites at the plasma membrane. But clathrin is a startlingly versatile protein that comes in different forms. Clathrins keep cropping up in new contexts, including actin polym-erization, mitosis, and even diabetes. Frances Brodsky has spent much of her career exploring clathrin's many secrets , spotting them within the thickets of biology like the avian species she fi nds in her spare time bird watching. Since fi rst encountering clathrins as a postdoc (1), her work on their nature (2, 3) and function (4, 5) has uncovered results that challenge and change our view of these proteins. Her lab is still making surprising new discoveries, as we learned when we spoke with her recently. You're from the US, but you did your graduate studies in the UK… During my last year as a Harvard undergraduate , I received a Marshall Scholarship to study in the UK for three years and opted to use the scholarship to fund my DPhil doctoral research. I'd been doing my senior thesis project in Paul Gottlieb's immunology lab at MIT. When I spoke with Paul about where I might go in England, he suggested I consider Walter Bodmer's lab in Oxford. Walter was giving a seminar at Harvard that week, so I went to hear him talk. I was attracted by the combination of immunology and genetics he described. When I joined Walter's lab, I was involved in making and characterizing some of the fi rst monoclonal antibodies against human HLA proteins. At the time, we knew nothing about HLA except that it was involved in immune function. We didn't even know that it was a peptide-binding protein. Those antibodies we produced were an important step in facilitating functional and structural analysis of HLA. Is that where you met your partner Peter Parham? Peter joined Walter's lab during my second year there. He came to Walter's lab as a postdoc because he had, completely independently , also attended Walter's Harvard seminar. We didn't know each other at Harvard, but when we met in Walter's lab we started working together and then became personally involved. We've been together ever since, though our research has now diverged. When did you fi rst encounter clathrin? I'd actually never heard of it until Peter and I returned to Harvard. …