Vann Bennett: How ankyrin holds it all together

P ick any animal cell, and chances are you'll fi nd a protein called ankyrin somewhere under the plasma membrane. Vann Bennett fi rst discovered ankyrin (1, 2) as the anchor that connects the anion exchanger to the spectrin-based membrane skeleton in erythrocytes. Ankyrin is a member of a family of adaptors that perform similar roles for multiple membrane transporters as well as cell adhesion molecules such as E-cadherin, L1 CAMs, and dystro-glycan—which helps explain its presence in multiple tissues (3). As a postdoctoral researcher, Bennett spent a year developing the assay he would later use to purify ankyrin from red blood cells (4). When his former graduate research advisor recruited him to work at Burroughs Wellcome, Bennett told him it should take about 18 months to fi nish purifying and characterizing the protein, and then he wanted to move on to other projects. Instead, the study of ankyrin family members has taken up his entire career (1–6) and provided important insights into how plasma membrane domains are organized (3). We caught up with Bennett at his lab at Duke University to talk about ankyrin, as well as some of his other lifelong obsessions. When did you fi rst consider pursuing a career in science? It's hard to say. I really loved history when I was in high school, so I thought I would major in history in college and then go to medical school to become a doctor like my father. I started out as a history major, but I found that math and chemistry were easy, whereas I had to work really hard at writing my history essays. [Laughs] They probably weren't very good! Then I had a particularly inspiring chemistry professor at Stanford named John Brauman, who actually let me work in his lab for a couple of years, and after that I switched majors to chemistry and biology. I made up my own major by combining the biology and chemistry programs and trimming some of the courses I didn't want to take. Did you go on to medical school as you had planned? I did. When I arrived at Johns Hopkins for medical school, I was still thinking about going into medical practice, because that's what I thought people did with a medical degree. But my fi rst summer, I was trying to think of some research that interested me. My advisor, Dan Nathans, suggested I …