Category: Protein of the week

Protein of the week- EASTER

Since it isn’t very long until Easter I had a look at an interesting protein named EASTER. Of course EASTER was discovered in Drosophila melanogaster. It is a maternal gene translated in the developing embryo, where it cleaves proSPAETZLE to activate SPAETZLE, which in turn establishes the dorsoventral axis of the embryo. EASTER is just […]

protein of the month- Prune

  This is a prune, I believe that that’s basically a dried plum. It is very very healthy and contains lots of vitamins and fibers and all this important stuff , however most people don’t seem to like it all that much. There are also at least two proteins, called prune, PRUNE 1 and PRUNE 2, […]

Nemo

by Juliane In 2003 these two fish swam across the pacific ocean to find Nemo: Five years earlier, S. Yamaoka and colleagues also set out to find Nemo, the NF-kappaB essential modifier. NF-kappaB is a very famous transcription factor, which is present in all eukaryotic cells and can be activated by a large number of […]

SNAP

You can snap your fingers. You can snap a photo, use it in windows 7 or snap a lock shut. To snap is a very useful verb. No wonder that some scientists (G. Oyler and colleagues) decided that SNAP would be a great acronym for synaptosomal-associated protein. SNAP was discovered in synaptosomes in 1989. Synaptosomes are […]

LAMP

by Juliane This is a lamp, lamps come in lots of different sizes and shapes. Some of them are even shaped like this: The lysosome-associated membrane glycoprotein, Lamp to its friends, is part of the lysosome and therefore involved in digestion of foreign materials and autophagy. LAMP1 and 2 were first discovered in 1985, since […]

cookie monster

I am happy to report that Drosophila geneticists have not lost their sense of humor in the last 40 years. This paper from 2003 describes the cloning and characterization of a novel meiotic arrest gene, which they name cookie monster, “because the cells look like a whole bunch of cookie monster eyes”. Cookie monster is […]

Oskar

I have previously written about Oscar, recently I found out that there is also Oskar which is is involved in Drosophila embryonic development. Oskar is transcribed from maternal mRNA and absolutely crucial for establishing the anterior-posterior axis of the developing embryo by localizing the germ line cells at the posterior pole of the embryo. The […]

Trance

If you follow this link, you will be able to listen to trance music, which was really popular in the 90s. Interestingly, at the same time a D. Anderson from the group of L. Galibert in Seattle and B. Wong from the group of Y. Choi in New York published papers about TRANCE the TNF […]

Spaetzle

by Juliane This week I will write about Drosophila genetics. The founding fathers of modern genetics were very creative when naming their favorite genes; from Sonic Hedgehog to Bride of Sevenless, their gene names read like titles of novels rather than hard science. While being super-creative however, they did groundbreaking science, resulting in several Nobel […]

oscar

by Juliane When you think about Oscar you might think about him: Or him: but unless you work on the effects of inflammation on bone density and development you might not think of the Osteoclast-associated immunoglobulin-like receptor. Osteoblasts (the cells that make bone) and osteoclasts (the cells that absorb bone) work together to maintain a […]