Tao of TAO and Tau
Pleasingly, the TAO signalling protein was named in 1998 for its thousand and one amino acids. There are at least three other human proteins in SWISSPROT with an amino acid length of 1001.
Tau protein on the other hand, was identified in 1975 out of the Kirschner lab who 'propose to call this protein tau for its ability to induce tubule formation'. Actually they wrote 'protein tau' and then a greek letter tau as well but I don't know how to reliably render that. I think in 1975 it was been evident that there were likely to be more than 23 more nameable proteins, but maybe they just figured they had got there first.
AKT
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 indeterminacyThe 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 mouseSo my guess is that T is for thymoma.
GSK3beta
GSK3beta is a glycogen synthase kinase. Various of these kinases were identified during the 1970s; the first time one was called glycogen synthase kinase-3 was in 1980 (Full text) with the characteristic rigour (it seems to have been the first uncontaminated purification) and literary unambition (it was the third they tackled) of the Cohen lab.
The beta appeared by the time two different cDNAs had been found in rat in 1990.
Amusingly, for those appropriately amused, GSK is the trademark of one of the world's largest pharmaceutical companies. There are rumours that the merger of Glaxo Wellcome and SmithKline Beecham in 2000 to form GlaxoSmithKline was driven by the intemperate demands of a hungry City for demonstrable action, any action, in a business where genuine scientific innovation takes decades to pay off. This is not true. The whole thing was an elaborate commercial counter-intelligence operation, designed to allow the newly named GSK freedom to operate on the key GSK3B pathway, without any rivals getting suspicious.
OK, that's not true either. Actually, Glaxo Wellcome and SmithKline Beecham merged to form GlaxoSmithKline because of a world shortage of space bars certified for FDA compliancy.
MAPK and ERK
MAPK, mitogen activated protein kinase. First named MAP kinase in 1988 , but from one of its specific substrates: microtubule associated protein (MAP-2). By 1989, it was realised that this was the same as the 42 kDa protein, phosphorylated by mitogen stimulation, known since 1981, and so it was retroacronymically renamed mitogen activated protein kinase.
When the protein was cloned in 1990 it was named, not MAPK, but ERK1 for extracellular-signal regulated kinase, a somewhat uninspired choice. MAPK is now more commonly used for the superfamily of related kinses of which the ERK family is one.
Ras and Raf
Ras was named by a committee in 1981, from rat sarcoma virus.
Now Ras is one of the activators of a protein called Raf. I originally thought Raf would be be named from Ras factor or something similar, but first I discovered there was a gene called Raf from 'regulation of alpha-fetoprotein' in 1977. Or was it a microbial gene for the ability to use the trisaccharide raffinose? But it was neither of these. Raf seems to get its name in a 1983 paper which gives no direct statement of derivation. It was isolated from 3611 murine sarcoma virus which transforms fibroblasts, so we might guess at 'rat fibroblast'. This was before there was any knowledge of Ras:Raf interactions so it's just the not-quite-coincidence that they both came from rat viruses.
Raf itself is a family of proteins. In a rather pleasing blow against hyper consistent nomenclature, the usual three are called A-Raf, named in 1986 'in recognition of its relatedness to the raf oncogene', B-Raf, named two years later 'because it is related to but distinct from c-raf and A-raf', and ... Raf-1. Raf-1, probably because the viral oncogene v-raf had two human homologues, c-raf-1 and a pseudogene c-raf-2. So when the time came for naming isoforms of Raf, presumably the one in Raf-1 was already passing as a modifier.
JNK and FOS
JNK: a c-Jun kinase. jun was an oncogene identified in 1987. Its name comes from ju-nana, the japanese number 17, for it was isolated from avian sarcoma virus (ASV) 17. The c- prefix meant cellular homologue. Think of jun and you think of fos (at least Dot does and she's a professor). fos took its name around 1983 from FBJ murine osteosarcoma virus. And FBJ turn out to be, rather splendidly, Miriam P Finkel, Birute O. Biskis, and PB Jinkins who identified the virus at Argonne in 1966.
After this proteoetymological excitment, the transcription factors coded by jun (some authors) or the heterodimers of either Jun or Fos (some others I met one of once) are more dully called AP1 for activator protein 1.
PP2A
Protein phosphatase 2A.
Somewhat uninspiredly named by the laboratory of Philip Cohen, although I think that lab found so many of them they could be forgiven. First identified as protein phospatase 'Type II' in 1977 because it was the second off a gel of a muscle fraction.
Converted to latin numbers and subtyped by the time of casting into stone by an Science review in 1983.
NFkB
NFkappaB: KBF2_HUMAN
nuclear factor that binds the kappa immunoglobulin light chain gene enhancer in B cells. (So kappa doesnt mean it is the eighth in a series, for Ig light chains are called kappa and lambda). First known use of NFkappaB is from David Baltimore's lab in 1987
The B in B cells, as any fule kno, is from Bursa of Fabricius, the lymphoid organ from they originate in Birds. Earliest usage of this I can find is 1972 (JSTOR access required) though they say the usage by then was common. At the time it wasn't known where B cells matured, unlike T cells.
