An interview with Professor Bruce Hood, School of Experimental Psychology, 11/11/2014 - by Melissa Levy

Professor Bruce Hood is a Professor of Developmental Psychology in Society. He is specifically interested in cognitive development from a neuroscience perspective, but also works on face and gaze processing, inhibitory control of thoughts and actions, spatial representation and action, naïve theories and the origin of adult magical reasoning from children’s natural intuitions. If you want any more information about what he and his group then follow this link: http://www.bristol.ac.uk/expsych/people/bruce-m-hood/

Where did you go to university and what did you study?

“My first university was the University of Dundee in Scotland where I did an arts degree. In Scotland you can do a four year degree and take lots of different topics, I didn’t know anything about psychology and I was doing things like economics, accountancy and finance but I had to take another subject and so I took psychology and fell in love with it! This made me decide that I wanted to be a psychologist! So I went to Cambridge and did my PHD there, so I’ve been in Scotland and Cambridge.”

How did you get from there to where you are now in Bristol?

“How long have you got?!

After Cambridge I had a position at UCL and then I got a MRC (medical research council) travelling fellowship which enabled me to go anywhere in the world and I went to MIT. So I did my post-doctorate at MIT and then I applied for a position at Harvard and I was an associate professor there for five years. Then I came to Bristol.”

How would you describe your area of research to someone who’s not in the field?

“Well I have very diverse interests but I suppose they all deal with aspects of development of mind - in the childhood origins of how we think as adults. I’m interested in children not because they’re kids but because I think they give a great insight into the complexity of adult behaviour and the human mind and also some indication as to how we’ve evolved complexity.”

How would you describe your typical day and your typical research? It’s obviously different to that of a chemist let’s say…

“Well unfortunately I don’t have the luxury of doing the research myself directly, although occasionally I will help out. I really love conducting research and collecting data but because I’ve got so many projects running simultaneously I can’t actually collect data myself. So usually it’s working with my post-docs and my grad-students to devise and design experiments, piloting them here in the centre and then very often taking them out into the community.

We do research at the @Bristol Science Museum, but we also collect data in the schools, so it’s a lot of what you would regard as field work. But if we were using a technology which doesn’t transport like eye-movement recordings or ERP (Event Related Potentials –brain signals) then we would do that in the lab.”

If you could go back to conducting the field work yourself would you do that or are you happy with where you are now?

“Yeah I am happy where I am now, but I’ve not lost touch with the sheer joy of data collecting. For me, experimentation is just wondrous and the fact that I can be paid for something that I enjoy so thoroughly is fantastic and I love to share that! I mean there are so many questions that I’d like to answer and I couldn’t answer them myself so I need to have people doing it for me and that’s why we have research students doing that all. I mean I would be delighted if I was just doing research.”

What advice would you give to someone looking for a career in science?

“Passion! That’s what gets you out of bed in the morning!

You have to have a sense of wonder and joy and curiosity, and if this is what you want then this should be enough to drive you forward, and if you have the confidence to do so then you should be fine.”

What has been your proudest achievement to date?

“Well I suppose it has to be giving the royal institute Christmas lectures on the BBC. I’m very passionate about what I do and I really want to take science out into the community and that is the pinnacle of public engagements so that gave me, for a very short time, a platform and a spotlight, which was really quite exceptional. I got to meet so many amazing people, I got to inspire people and I’ve had email correspondence from parents of young children – they still contact me three years later keeping me up to date with their achievements in science and I find that extraordinarily valuable to realise that what you do actually changes people’s lives and makes a difference.

 I’ve always felt that we (psychologists) have a bit of an identity problem that people don’t see us as a real science and that really annoys me. So that’s my other agenda, to make sure people understand how complex the mind can be and that it’s not common sense at all. There are some extraordinary things that we are yet to discover. So yeah I’m passionate about science communication.”

If you could do science with anyone, dead or alive, who would it be?

“Gosh, so many to choose from!

One of my greatest mentors was Richard Gregory. You may not know, but Richard Gregory was and still is a great influence on many of us. Richard effectively started the first science museum, the Exploratorium here in Bristol, and he was a great and passionate science communicator. He did some really brilliant work on vision and perception, has illusions named after him – everyone who works in my field of perception will know of Richard Gregory. He was of a genre with a connection to the past, he knew Wittgenstein, he was taught by some of the great names, so he made this connection for me with the past. But he was just so enthusiastic and so passionate – it was infectious, he was like a little child at times when he was talking about things! And really that’s what’s so important to me about science.

People think that science is dull and boring and of course it isn’t! You and I know that it’s actually very fulfilling, and  communicating that passion in a way which is sensible to the general public is what my agenda is.”

Inside story: Professor Andrew Orr-Ewing - School of Chemistry

Interview by Melissa Levy

Q. Where did you go to university and what did you study?
I went to university in Oxford where I studied both an undergraduate degree in chemistry and also for my PhD in chemistry, so I was there a total of 7 years.

Q. How did you get from there to where you are now in Bristol?
When I finished in Oxford I went to work for two years at Stanford University in California which was a great experience as I worked with a very eminent professor there. Then I started thinking about my future and so I applied for something called a Royal Society University Research Fellowship which is a way in which you can move back to an academic position in the UK while having a lot of freedom as to where you go. It also gives you a chance to focus on your research. I was very fortunate in securing one of those which I chose to hold at Bristol. I didn't really know Bristol at the time, but I knew of some very good people here who I wanted to work alongside and so I selected Bristol as the best place to come to. I’ve never regretted that decision, it has turned out very well for me!

Q. How would you describe your research to someone who’s never studied chemistry?
There is quite a lot of different activity in my group but the connecting theme is that we use lasers to study interesting chemical processes, and those vary!
One of the things we do is look at gases in the earth’s atmosphere; either detect them at very low concentration with sophisticated laser spectroscopy methods or we study how these molecules react in the presence of sunlight. So we look at the photochemistry that is driven by sunlight and we quantify that in terms of rate constants and things like that. That’s one aspect of the work that we do!

The other work is much more fundamental. What we try to understand is how chemical reactions happen, and in the past four or five years we’ve started to ask how that happens in liquids which is a really complicated question because the molecules in liquids are colliding over very short time scales.  We use very fancy laser equipment which generates pulses of about 10-14 seconds in duration to follow chemistry as it’s happening in liquids. So what we do is really just infrared spectroscopy but on ridiculously short time scales and that allows us to follow chemical reactions in real time.

Q. How would you describe your typical day in the lab/at university in general?
Unfortunately I don’t spend very much time in the lab these days, just the nature of the job really – as you get older you tend to spend less time in the lab and more time in your office, so my research group do most of the activity in the lab these days.

But days are really varied, I do lots of different things so I don’t generally have a rigid plan. I come in and there’s always a pile of things that need doing; that might be writing papers, or it might be working on a PhD thesis draft that a student has sent me, or it might be refereeing a paper or a grant application, or it might be preparing for some teaching that I have to do that day. That’s one of the really nice things about the job – it’s very varied and it’s always intellectually challenging, so I’m happy to come in in the mornings. I do like to start quite early, it’s peaceful then and I can concentrate before all the interruptions start! The downside of it is what comes in on the email that you’re not expecting because that can disrupt any plans that you might have for the day.

But really it’s the variety that keeps most of us interested!

Q. If you had the choice to just do research instead of all of the other things you do as well, what would you choose?
I think that the teaching is a very important part of the job and it’s a part that I enjoy greatly. It’s very satisfying to be able to communicate things that excite you to other people and I wouldn't want to do a job that just involves pure research. The bit of the job that most of us don’t like is the more administrative side, it’s the more tedious aspect but it’s very necessary. But in general, the teaching is great fun and the research is great fun and for that reason I wouldn't want to be a pure researcher. Interacting with keen young students is one of the more rewarding aspects of the job.

Q. What advice would you give someone looking for a career in science?
Academic careers can be a challenging path, because there are a limited number of job opportunities in universities to hold teaching and research positions. As a result, you have to know that you really want to go down that path and be prepared to be patient for a good position to open up. But studying for a science degree and doing research for a PhD creates lots of other opportunities too, in industry or many other areas where you can apply your scientific knowledge. Increasingly these days in things like environmental consultancy. I’d never discourage someone from studying science! I think it opens your eyes to a lot of important questions in the world around us and allows you to understand really significant issues, such as climate change. 

Q. If you could do research with anyone, dead or alive, who would it be?
That’s a tricky one! I’ve been very fortunate to work with some really talented scientists and that is extremely stimulating, you learn something from everyone you engage with. When you’re an active researcher you go to conferences and you mix with lots of scientists and learn something from all of these people. Often you’re in awe of how clever they are and how much they know that you don’t think you understand, which is a great motivation to keep educating yourself.
But I’m not really interested in celebrity science, so I don’t see that I would want to work with one of the greats of the past. I’m more interested with working with people who are enthusiastic and motivated and share my passion for particular areas of science.

So I’m going to dodge the question a bit and say that I’m really happy with the people that I work with here, both in my research group and my colleagues, who keep me interested in the work that we’re doing all the time – in terms of enjoying research, that’s definitely the way to do it.

Inside story: Professor Andrew Halestrap - School of Biochemistry

Interview by Melissa Levy

Andrew Halestrap is a professor in the school of Biochemistry as well as as the head of his own research group who are interested in both the role of mitochondria in cell death and monocarboxylate (lactate) transporters. If you want more information about the work which he and his group do then click here.

Where did you go to university and what did you study?
“I was at Cambridge, where I studied Natural Sciences specialising in Biochemistry and then I came here to do my PhD. That was a long time ago and I stayed here ever since! I started my PhD working with Dick Denton (Professor Richard Denton), working on the regulation of fat metabolism in the epididymal fat pad. And then I branched out… I stayed in Bristol, got a fellowship and then a lectureship and I stayed here ever since. I’m very unusual [in that] l I stayed here ever since my PhD.”

If you had to describe the research you are doing to someone who doesn't understand the concepts, how would you describe it?
“Well I’ve got two areas of research that I’m doing at the moment. The bigger area of research is how you protect the heart from damage after a heart attack or during heart surgery. So during a heart attack when you have a coronary thrombosis (the coronary artery is clotted with thrombus) the blood supply stops and then the downstream area is gradually getting damaged because it’s got no oxygen. What they do when they bring you in to hospital is to clear the blockage (we call that reperfusion) and unfortunately the reperfusion, which you’ve got to do to restore the heart function…causes more damage. [It works by doing] something to the mitochondria, it turns them into reverse so instead of providing the energy to drive the cell they actually start breaking down ATP and destroying the cell.  This gives you a damaged area called the infarct, which is just dead necrotic tissue. We are understanding the molecular mechanism and developing treatments to prevent that from happening which will prevent the heart from this damage. And it’s relevant in surgery because when you have cardiac surgery you also have to stop the heart which means stopping the supply of blood, and if the surgery is long then you can get this same reperfusion damage. So we’re also working for cardiac surgeons and applying some of the stuff we do in the lab, understanding the mechanism and how we can prevent it, in the clinical field.  There are clinical trials going on with some of this stuff which is quite exciting! The first clinical trial was successful so we’ll keep our fingers crossed.  And then the other area is in lactic acid production in our cells, which is why I sometimes rabbit on about lactic acid (!!). The process whereby lactic acid gets in and out of cells is a process we discovered many years ago working on the molecular mechanism, and the particular interest at the moment is understanding the structure of the transportes so that we can design better inhibitors that could block the process in tumour cells. If you block lactic acid efflux from tumour cells you can actually kill them!”

How would you describe your typical day?
“A lot of my time is spent writing reviews on grant applications and reviewing papers because I act as an editor and referee of papers. A lot of time is spent writing papers, reading papers, talking with my research group; I don’t get to the bench much now. So I talk with my people regularly about what they’re doing and we think about the next set of experiments. Then sometimes of course (like today) I have a fair bit of teaching and marking to do, some days they’ll be very little teaching. And then there’s administrative jobs, various university committees and things that take up [time]”

What’s your favourite part of your job?
“Oh, well either doing bench research which is really fun but I rarely do it, or just thinking through data and deciding what experiments to do next; it can be very exciting but also very frustrating.”

Do you have any advice for someone who’s looking towards a career in science? 
“The first advice is that if you really want to be active in hands on research you’ll have to do a PhD, and you’ll probably end up doing some post-doctoral work as well. If you’re really good, and that’s only a very few now, you may then get a permanent research position as an academic or in a research institute. Other people will probably realise that they’re not quite good enough to get to the top of the pile so they can go off into maybe an industrial position acting as science officer. Realistically far more people will want to do research than will be able to… So some are going to end up, either after the PhD or the postdoc, going into other science related things. It could be teaching, it could be scientific journalism it could be a rep for a biotech company. There are many levels where you could use your science. And other people change completely and become a managing director and go and do an MBA - It’s very varied!”

What is the most memorable moment of your career so far?
“Ooooooh most memorable? Well I’ve had several that’s the problem! I had a eureka moment; I was literally in the bath and I was trying to work out a way of measuring how much this mitochondrial pore was opening in a heart. I was sitting in the bath and I had an idea, it was just a eureka moment and it worked and it’s one of my most cited papers. That was a good one! But there have been plenty of others.”

If you could do research with anyone in the world, dead or alive, who would it be?
“I was asked this by someone else in a different context and I found it very difficult to choose one person because, when you get to my age, you’ve worked with a lot of good people. I don’t know really… I think the scientist I admire most is probably Fred Sanger (who’s now dead). He took up a challenge that people thought was ridiculous - to sequence proteins - and he succeeded and then rather than capitalising on that he thought ‘well I’ll go off and sequence nucleic acids’. And he went and did that and got a second Nobel prize. He’s [also] a very humble guy, and when he was 65 and he decided it was time to retire he just left science and worked in his allotment. I think that’s a very special person.”

Inside story: Dr Craig Butts - School of Chemistry

Interview by Melissa Levy

Dr Craig Butts is a reader for the school of Chemistry as well as a researcher in the area of structural and mechanistic chemistry, with special emphasis on Nuclear Magnetic Resonance. If you want any more information about what he and his group do then follow this link.

Q. Where did you go to university and what did you study?

“So I studied science at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand, I did a BSC honours in science and then majored in chemistry.”

Q. How did you get all the way from there in New Zealand to here at Bristol?

“I went into science in university basically because I had fun doing it at school! But up until I was about 16 I wanted to be an accountant (this was in the 1980’s and I wanted to be a yuppie (!)) [But] I suddenly realised that accountancy wasn't something I enjoyed a great deal and in fact I much preferred blowing things up in class. And so I went into science at university and…the bit that I really enjoyed was doing the research project in my final year, which made me want to carry on in academic research or in research at least. Particularly due to the encouragement of my supervisor who, about 6 weeks into my project basically just walked up and said “you obviously enjoy this, you’re good at it…do you want a PhD?”. The deal was if I got a first class honours then I could have a PhD place and so I then carried on to do my PhD with my project supervisor working on photochemical reaction mechanisms trying to work out how these photochemical reactions proceeded. In particular we were interested in nitration reactions using a compound that was only really studied in the 1950s as a rocket fuel adaptive by the Russians, tetranitromethane – it was hideous stuff… and we knew that it did this photochemical reaction but we wanted to know HOW it worked and why it worked, and the only evidence that there was in the literature we were pretty sure was wrong!  Near the end of my PhD realised that I hadn’t quite worked out what I wanted to do afterwards! In New Zealand there are not a lot of opportunities around for PhD trained chemists – which was a bit of an oversight on my part - but it never bothered me until that stage! 

So the first email I ever sent outside of the chemistry department in Canterbury was to Professor Rodger Alder here at Bristol and I basically said ‘What’s the deal? Are there any jobs over there? Can I get one?’ and he wrote back and said ‘yeah I’ve got some funding for a post-doctoral research post for 3 years’ and so I applied for that and got it…. I submitted the final draft of my PhD thesis on the morning and on the afternoon I got on a plane to Britain and started my postdoc!”

Q. How did you find his email address or him at all?

“How did I find his email address? I have no idea!! At that stage the web was really early on… I guess there must have been a Bristol website that I would have looked at but I knew to contact HIM because my PhD supervisor had sent students over to him in the past. Once I got over here my plan was always: come over to Britain for 3 years, get this postdoctoral experience which you had to have in order to go and become an academic there… and I never got around to leaving!  I was [now] 23 and I’d never had a job interview, so I applied for a temporary job at the university of Exeter as a lecturer thinking I’d never get it because I’m only 23 and I’ve no experience but I should at least have this practice! And blow me down if they didn’t offer me, not the job that was advertised… they actually gave the job to someone who was already at Exeter and I got his job. So yeah I got lucky basically! [When] I had just submitted the job application I went to the out to celebrate because I was just starting to think that I might actually stay in Britain. I went out to the pub on a Friday night and I started asking everyone in the pub (boys girls whatever) if they had a passport and if they would therefore marry me! And one of the people who walked into the pub subsequently married me! About 5 years later I mean she didn't agree to go out with me for another year! [So] I met my wife and got married and had kids and never quite got around to leaving. Simple as that! 

And then 2005 they closed the chemistry department at Exeter and at that stage I was contacted by my soon-to-be boss here and they said that they had a job here managing the NMR facility, so I took that. It wasn't actually an academic post and so I spent a couple of years getting back into an academic post here at the university and I've been going here ever since.”

Q. If you had to describe the research you do to someone who isn't an expert in chemistry how would you describe it?

“So what we do is primarily to work out the structure of chemicals and we use NMR spectroscopy to do this. NMR spectroscopy is basically the same thing as you do in MRI in hospitals, instead of doing it on a whole person we do it on a very small sample and we look at it on a molecule by molecule basis. My particular research interests are working out ways to better determine those structures and work out what shape they are and what size they are and how they are moving in solution and things like that.”

Q. And how would you describe your typical day?

“Ahh my days are very very varied!  So I split my time into three parts. One is running the NMR laboratory; so I manage the NMR laboratory and I have to, along with the technical staff, look after something like £3 million worth of NMR instruments (soon to be 4 million) and so I spend about a third of my day working with PhD students and post doc researchers who are using those instruments and have run into challenges and problems that they can’t solve without a bit of help, and trying to work out ways to get new instruments which have better or more capabilities. I spend about a third of my time doing research with my own group; so every morning 9 o’clock one of my group come in for their weekly meeting and we talk about how their research is going and what that’s doing. Then about a third of my time or so is spent doing all of the other things that come with academia so primarily teaching, both undergraduate where I teach to the chemistry students but also postgrad teaching which is aimed particularly at NMR spec and the more advanced applications of that to the huge variety of projects that we have in the university.  And then there’s the boring admin bits that we have to do as part of the job.”

Q. Do you have a favourite part of your job? If you had the choice would you chose JUST lecturing or JUST research?

“No… I’d chose to do all of them! To me research is a jigsaw puzzle, you’ve got a problem to solve and you have to know all the different ways of solving it.. Then you start with the corners you build up the edges and then you stick everything into the middle. That’s fascinating to me I mean I get to do that for a living – that’s great fun.  But it’s hard work, there are bits of it which are mind numbing and monotonous and so teaching is a completely different break from that. You get to stand up and get excited about what you do in front of a bunch of people, trying to get them to understand what you do and and why you do it and how you do it, hopefully to the point that at the end of that they know better than you do…I wouldn’t want to do one thing or the other really, if I did either full time I’d die! The paperwork [though] I could avoid quite merrily! “

Q. What do you do when you’re not at university? 

*laughing* “So there are three things I do when I’m not at university. First and foremost I’ve got three kids who are an absolute joy and I spend most of my time... well I’d like to say playing with them and teaching them and all the other things that parents are supposed to do but I think running around after them better describes it. Second thing, I’m a sports fanatic [and] I follow pretty much anything that involve a ball or a bat, so obviously football and rugby and cricket, and then when my wife can’t hear me on a Sunday night I’m often listening to American baseball and bizarre things like that. And the third thing I do is, sad to admit, research.... My research is a hobby for me, pretty much every day in some way fashion or form if I’m not on holiday I’ll be logging in to some of our spectrometers or checking what’s happening or I spend a lot of time talking to people in the states about different NMR techniques and tricks and tips that we can use. I’ve always looked at my job at being my hobby and so I have to come into the office to do my hobby sometimes and other times I get to do it from home.”

Q.What advice would you give to someone looking towards a career in science? Would you recommend academia?

“Absolutely! You have to have the right mind-set; you have to be the kind of person who likes puzzles and problems and likes long term challenges and targets. Academia is about saying ‘we’ve got this big long term goal, let’s start now to solve all the problems and the challenges on the way’ and that’s quite a hard thing to keep focused on over long periods of time. I've worked on projects that have taken over a decade to come to fruition, when they do come to fruition it’s a fantastic thing. I had a look at jobs in industry when I was younger and I just couldn’t do it! I couldn’t do that short term project focus that dominates in industry and commerce. [Academia] is hard work, particularly early on in academic careers, there are a lot of targets you have to achieve very quickly and at a very high level, and that’s very hard to do when you’re just starting out but it’s thoroughly enjoyable. I never ever (I keep telling people this it’s very sad) don’t want to come to work. I never sit here and think ‘oh it’s only 2 o’clock I’ve got another 3 hours before I get to go home’, never happens… I get ‘Oh it’s 4 o’clock I guess I have to leave!’ Not because I don’t want to leave *laughing* but because I have so many things to do and so many things I want to do.”

Q. If you could do science/research with anyone (dead or alive) who would it be?

“I want to do science with people who love science, who get as much enjoyment out of it as I do. To be honest I’m not interested in doing science with Einstein or Marie Curie (well particularly not Marie Curie…) or anything like that, I want to work with lots of people on lots of things and that’s one of the reasons I enjoy my job. I get to do chemistry with 250 side-kicks... Well I guess they’re not my side-kicks …. So I’m going to avoid the question and say that I want to keep on working with the people I’m working with, I mean I get to choose in my job who I work with what I work on when I work on it and to me is all part of the joy of it!”

Inside story: Dr Elaine Thomas - School of Biochemistry

Interview by Melissa Levy

Dr Elaine Thomas is a lecturer for the school of Biochemistry, as well as a researcher alongside Linda O'Flaherty and Jeremy Tavaré.  The group looks mainly at the regulation of glucose uptake by insulin and protein kinase signalling in lung cancer and glioma. If you want more information about what they do, click here.

Q. Where did you go to university and what did you study?
“I went to the University of Queensland in Australia and I studied a bachelor in science and majored in biochemistry and molecular cell biology… In the first year it was quite broad; I did some basic biology and biochemistry, we did some plant biology and human biology and then it was only in the second year we then started doing the majoring and I did biochemistry. I did my (masters) project on the sorting nexins (work that Pete Cullen in does now in the same department)… that was before anything was known about the sorting nexins…  [And we] developed some main concepts about the human retinol complexes and distribution of those proteins.”

See below for information about sorting nexins!

Q. How did you get from there to working here at Bristol?
“So after my honours I actually worked as a technician in a lab that was interested in insulin signalling and I worked on a protein called RNS1. But at the same time there was a project about a protein called RMPDH which was found to be phosphorylated in response to insulin and was recruited to lipid droplets…I found that really quite interesting! I then went overseas for about a year and a half…did some travelling, worked in a ski resort town - it was essentially a gap year whilst working. I also worked in a research lab in London for a little bit. I did my PhD (back in Australia) on IMPDH in the same lab that I had been in. The project changed focus, as PHD projects usually do, and then I guess during my time there I became interested in insulin signalling and GLUT4 biology. And so I came over here after my PhD and started working on the protein TBC1D1 in Jeremy’s (Professor Jeremy Tavaré) lab. So I’ve been sort of interested in energy homeostasis for a while and I guess of different mechanisms and the regulation of proteins that are involved in these processes.”

Q. How would you describe your typical day as a researcher/lecturer?
**laughing** “Tricky! I do quite a lot of cell culture, so I suppose Monday’s are setting up cells for experiments during the week, then we might have a lab meeting where we discuss what’s going on in the lab, then I have tutorials sort of scattered around during the week …. Might need to do some project solving for my work and also talking with other people in the lab…also analysing data.

Q. Do you like the fact that you are a tutor and lecturer as well as the fact that you do research?
“I do enjoy it! It can be a struggle getting the time management right, but I have enjoyed the lecturing as well as the tutorials because … I find it quite rewarding interacting with the students, and it gives a wider perspective on the work that I’m doing: the lectures that I give are on GLUT4 translocation and so it kind of shows the bigger picture and hopefully makes me a better scientist.”

Q. What advice would you give to someone looking to have a career in science?
"Follow what you enjoy and what you’re good at!"

Q.  If you could do research with one person, dead or alive, who would it be?
(After much deliberation) “I’m torn between some of the people who did the seminal molecular biology projects, Watson and Crick and Mary Curie, versus the people like Matthias Mann you know Mr Proteomics… Probably one of the seminal scientists like Crick!”

Some of the areas of science covered in this interview: 

- Sorting nexins are a large group of proteins that are localized in the cytoplasm and have the potential for membrane association either through their lipid-binding PX domain (a phospholipid-binding motif) or through protein-protein interactions with membrane-associated protein complexes. Some members of this family have been shown to facilitate protein sorting.

- Glucose transporter type 4, also known as GLUT4, is a protein that in humans is encoded by the GLUT4 gene. GLUT4 is the insulin-regulated glucose transporter found primarily in adipose tissues and striated muscle (skeletal and cardiac) that is responsible for insulin-regulated glucose transport into the cell.