Studier and John Dunn were busy figuring out how to trick the standard E. coli bacteria into making large quantities of almost any protein they wanted. They did this by using a special signal used by a virus called T7 that attacks E. coli and enables it to hijack the bacterial apparatus to make its own proteins. They figured that they could get E. coli to make large quantities of any desired protein by introducing the special signal from T7 to the beginning of the gene for that protein.
