During the 30 years that Memorial Sloan-Kettering scientist Phuong-Van Luc investigated transcriptional regulation, no database existed for quickly finding out if a protein was part of a complex. As a result, Luc was left with few clues to help understand the function of a newly identified protein.

Luc tried to keep on top of the large number of proteins involved in transcriptional machinery by reading a lot of papers, but she found it hard to maintain a broader view of her bench work when she was spending long hours doing experiments.