deodands

AKT

AKT is a key signalling molecule. Its name doesn't shout out at a first proteoetymological glance because there are so many signalling molecules with a K for Kinase in their names. But this (along with NF-Kb) is an exception. The K arrived in around 1928 for a strain of mouse; the mouse itself, A came froma Pennsylvania petshop, and the T arrived 50 years later for thymus.

AKT was isolated from the AKR/J mouse, the Jackson laboratory strain of the strain of mouse bred for a high degree of leukaemia by Jacob Furth at the Cornell Medical School.

He was reviewing that work in 1946, which was published by Cole RK and Furth J as Experimental studies on the genetics of spontaneous leukemia in mice in Cancer Res. 1:957-65. Can't find that online or off (UManchester starts in 1942; ICI still mainly making bakelite at the time). [A different citing is Furth, J., Siebold, H. R. & Rathbone, R. R. (1933) Amer. J. Cancer 19, 521-604. but that is not listed in the National Academy obituary bibliography] The review paper goes on to comment on the fact that 'only' 70% of these mice develop leukaemia as follows:

The fact that a certain number of mice of a highly inbred strain fails to develop leukemia may be explained in the opinion of R. R. Gates by the conceptions of penetrance or by Heisenberg's principle of indeterminacy

The Gates reference is a book: R Ruggles Gates, Human Genetics, New York:Macmillan (1946). He was an active botanist and then human geneticist and has left behind a slew of works which look cringingly racist to a modern eye (or even a post 1945 one: Science, 1950, Vol 111, p43). But his primary legacy to the world is the availability of birth control: his marriage to the young Marie Stopes was so, um, indeterminate around the conceptions of penetrance that she went off to the library to find out why things were 'not quite right' (p2)...

Anyway, the AK mouse. The Jackson laboratory (fascinating book chapter on its often commercially driven role in the construction of laboratory mice as scientific objects) says that

AKR Albino: a,B,c. Origin: a dealer named Detwiler in Norristown PA. Carried by Furth as a high-leukaemia strain from 1928 to 1936, then random bred at the Rockefeller Inst. for several generations. b x s by Mrs. Rhoades to F9 then C.Lynch to F21.

So it's just possible the A is for Albino. Finally found Furth's own account in Origins of Inbred Mice, ed HC Morse III, Academic Press 1978. In 1928, he

... began inbreeding three stocks of mice; two obtained from a commercial breeder were named "A" and "S." "A" mice were purchased from a dealer in Pennsylvania who was the supplier of mice to the long extinct cancer research laboratory (supported by the DuPont family) where I learned that leukemia did occur in the "A" stock, albeit infrequently..."A" ultimately yielded the AKR strain, the topic of this report.

He goes on later to point out it was really an Akr mouse because the k and the r were sublines. So we can only imagine that the K is just the twelfth subline he made.

The T seems to have arrived in 1977 when AKT was isolated from a

thymoma cell line AKT-8 from a spontaneously lymphomatous AKR/J mouse

So my guess is that T is for thymoma. Posted by Jonathan at May 3, 2006 03:35 PM