Günter Blobel and Bernhard Dobberstein provided experimental evidence supporting the signal hypothesis proposed earlier by Blobel and Sabatini. Through in vitro translation experiments using membrane-bound ribosomes from murine myeloma cells, they showed that immunoglobulin light chains containing an amino-terminal signal sequence were incorporated into the microsomal membranes and had the signal cleaved, while light chains lacking a signal sequence were not incorporated. This provided strong evidence that a signal sequence on the nascent polypeptide targets it for attachment to the membrane during translation.