http://www.swintons.net/deodands/ me.]]> en-us 2006-05-26T14:18:47+00:00 http://www.swintons.net/deodands/archives/000187.html 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,... Proteoetymology Jonathan 2006-05-26T14:18:47+00:00 http://www.swintons.net/deodands/archives/000186.html There is not one surgical centre in England and Wales dealing with coronary artery bypass grafts where the case mortality rate is worse than expected. That is the falsely reassuring claim implied by the Healthcare Commission’s website. The site, based... Jonathan 2006-05-26T09:35:24+00:00 http://www.swintons.net/deodands/archives/000185.html 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... Proteoetymology Jonathan 2006-05-03T15:35:54+00:00 http://www.swintons.net/deodands/archives/000183.html The new BBC catalogue, just like Google Earth, has made happen one of those things that the Web so clearly promised ten years ago. Characteristically, though, they hide away in the technical details their most farsighted piece of design (my... Jonathan 2006-04-28T14:25:27+00:00 http://www.swintons.net/deodands/archives/000181.html My home page contains a paragraph pointing out ways in which I am adjectivally different from Tilda Swinton. (I am old enough to think of my home page as ~swinton which makes it a mightily amusing as well as informative... Jonathan 2006-03-13T21:44:09+00:00 http://www.swintons.net/deodands/archives/000179.html [My friend RL is nearly at the end of a pureish maths degree and is considering a physics one and an applied maths MSc] There is something to be said for acquiring lots of human knowledge by doing degree after... Jonathan 2006-02-13T23:01:11+00:00 http://www.swintons.net/deodands/archives/000177.html A Times story about Waitrose being worst at selling alcohol to minors. Findings from an alcohol enforcement campaign suggested that Waitrose had the worst record for selling alcohol to under-18s, followed by Somerfield and the Co-op. Waitrose sold alcohol in... Jonathan 2006-02-10T14:30:58+00:00 http://www.swintons.net/deodands/archives/000161.html 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... Proteoetymology Jonathan 2005-02-03T23:25:34+00:00 http://www.swintons.net/deodands/archives/000160.html 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... Proteoetymology Jonathan 2005-02-01T22:04:31+00:00 http://www.swintons.net/deodands/archives/000155.html 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... Proteoetymology Jonathan 2005-01-24T14:12:12+00:00 http://www.swintons.net/deodands/archives/000154.html 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... Proteoetymology Jonathan 2005-01-21T19:28:40+00:00 http://www.swintons.net/deodands/archives/000153.html 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... Proteoetymology Jonathan 2005-01-21T19:06:28+00:00 http://www.swintons.net/deodands/archives/000152.html 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... Proteoetymology Jonathan 2005-01-21T18:26:59+00:00 http://www.swintons.net/deodands/archives/000144.html Byron Cooper (1850-1933) was a British landscape painter who was active at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century. He lived most of his life in south Manchester. This entry contains some of the source... Byron Cooper Jonathan 2004-12-23T18:20:39+00:00 http://www.swintons.net/deodands/archives/000117.html I gave my Turing and Fibonacci phyllotaxis talk at the Turing 2004 conference yesterday. It was at Manchester University, on Oxford Road. 10 minutes into my talk, the fire alarm went off, and I ended up bellowing most of the... Turing Jonathan 2004-06-06T11:37:54+00:00