NURF was first purified from the model organism Drosophila melanogaster by Toshio Tsukiyama and Carl Wu in 1995. Tsukiyama and Wu described NURF’s chromatin remodeling activity on the hsp70 promoter. It was later discovered that NURF regulates transcription in this manner for hundreds of genes. A human ortholog of NURF, called hNURF, was isolated in 2003.