Tonegawa is best known for elucidating the genetic mechanism in the adaptive immune system. If each antibody was coded by one gene, it would take millions of genes to protect against antigens.
Instead, as Tonegawa showed in a landmark series of experiments beginning in 1976, genetic material can rearrange itself to form the vast array of available antibodies. The main mechanism is called RNA splicing.
Antibodies have a 'variable region' in their structure. Tonegawa compared the DNA of B cells (a type of white blood cell) in embryonic and adult mice. He found that genes in the mature B cells of the adult mice are moved around, recombined, and deleted to make the many versions of the variable region of antibodies.
The critical work was started in Basle, Switzerland, and later at MIT. "Our work resolved the long held debate on the genetic origin of antibody diversity. It turned out that this diversity is generated by somatic recombination of the inherited gene segments and by somatic mutation".
Edexcel
Edexcel is a UK examination board. It is one of England, Wales and Northern Ireland's five main examination boards. Edexcel is owned by the private-sector Pearson PLC. The company offers many qualifications including A levels and GCSEs. Edexcel's name is from the words "education" and "excellence".
Chamber pot
A chamber pot (also a chamberpot), a piss pot, a potty, a po, a gazunder, or a thunder pot) is a container with a handle, usually used as a urinal at night. It is kept in a bedroom under a bed or in a nightstand.
During Victorian times, some chamber pots were built into a cabinet with a closeable cover.
The chamber pot was originally designed for females. Called the "Bourdaloue", it allowed women to urinate squatting or sitting without accidents. It was supposedly named after the French Catholic priest Louis Bourdaloue, whose sermon were so long that women brought "Bourdaloue" so they could urinate without having to leave.
In the 19th century, water closets started to be more common than chamber pots, but chamber pots were still used until the mid-20th century. Today, they are used in countries that have no indoor plumbing.
In North America and the UK, "potty" refer to the toilets made especially for potty training. These toilets are similar to chamber pots.
In the Philippines, chamber pots are used as urinals and are commonly called "Arinola" in Philippine languages like Tagalog and Cebuano.
In Korea, chamber pots are referred to as yogang (요강). Currently, they are still used in some country regions in the North.
SimCity 2000
SimCity 2000 is a city building computer game released in 1994. It is the sequel to "SimCity". It had a lot of new things such as more power plants, hills and mountains, subways, water pipes, prisons, schools, libraries, museums, and hospitals. There were also roads, highways, and other buildings.
The game also had different scenarios.
Jonathan Dickinson State Park
Jonathan Dickinson State Park is a Florida State Park and historic site in Martin County, Florida, between Hobe Sound and Tequesta. The park has many kinds of areas, such as sand pine scrub, pine flatwoods, mangroves, and river swamps. The Loxahatchee River, which was named a National Wild and Scenic River in 1985 (the first in Florida), runs through the park. The address is 16450 S.E. Federal Highway, Hobe Sound.
The park is named after Jonathan Dickinson, a Quaker merchant who was shipwrecked in 1696, with his family and others, on the Florida coast near the present-day park. He wrote a journal about their encounters with local tribes, and their journey up the coast to St. Augustine.
A man known as Trapper Nelson lived on the banks of the Loxahatchee River after coming to the area in the 1930s, living off the land trapping and selling furs. He soon became known as the "Wildman of the Loxahatchee". After he died in 1968 the state got his land, and gave it to the park.
The United States Army established Camp Murphy, a top-secret radar training school, in the area that is now the park, in 1942. The camp included over 1,000 buildings, and housed more than 6,000 officers and soldiers. The camp stopped being used in 1944, after only two years. Most of the camp buildings were torn down, but some of the building foundations remain. The property was given to the State of Florida in 1947, and opened as a state park in 1950.
The park has such activities as bicycling, boat tours, boating, cabins, canoeing, fishing, hiking, horse trails, kayaking, picnicking areas, swimming, wildlife viewing and full camping facilities. It also has the Elsa Kimbell Environmental Education and Research Center, with exhibits about the park's natural and cultural history. The park operates a 44-passenger boat for tours of Trapper Nelson's homestead.
Phillip Sharp
Phillip Allen Sharp (born June 6, 1944) is an American geneticist and molecular biologist.
He co-discovered gene splicing, and shared the 1993 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Richard Roberts for "the discovery that genes in eukaryotes are not contiguous strings but contain introns, and that the splicing of pre-messenger RNA to delete those introns can occur in different ways, yielding different proteins from the same DNA sequence".
Sharp was born in Falmouth, Kentucky. He completed his PhD in chemistry at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1969. After completing his PhD he worked at the California Institute of Technology until 1971, where he studied plasmids and, later, gene expression in human cells at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory under James Watson.
In 1974 he was offered a position at MIT by biologist Salvador Luria. He was director of MIT's Center for Cancer Research (now the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research) from 1985 to 1991; head of the Biology department from 1991 to 1999; and director of the McGovern Institute for Brain Research from 2000 to 2004.
It used to be thought that each gene on DNA coded for a single protein in a continuous strip. In 1997 Sharp and Roberts independently found out that genes were split into segments that were combined later in RNA processing.
Sharp and Roberts proved that the coding DNA is separated by stretches of DNA which are non-coding. The coding sections are exons, and the non-coding sections are introns.
Furthermore, it turned out that this structure occurs in all higher organisms. The discovery that a gene in could be present in the genetic material as several distinct and separate segments was revolutionary.
The second part of Sharp's work was in gene-splitting and gene splicing. This means to cut pieces out of, and add pieces to, a coding sequence. This creates a protein which works differently from the original version.
This kind of structure may allow more flexible responses to environmental change, and so speed up evolution. The structure may also be responsible for a number of inherited genetic defects.
Here's a key part of the Nobel presentation speech by Professor Bertil Daneholt of the Nobel Assembly of the Karolinska Institute:
Anti-Comintern Pact
The Anti-Comintern Pact was a pact between Nazi Germany and the Empire of Japan, which would later joined by more countries, in Berlin, Germany, on November 25, 1936. It was set up directly against the Comintern, or Communist International, an organization that was led by the Soviet Union. On November 6, 1937, Fascist Italy joined the pact, which was the beginning of the Axis Powers.
Reichstag fire
The Reichstag fire () was an arson (setting fire) on the Reichstag building, the meeting place of the German Parliament, in Berlin on 27 February 1933. It was an important event in the creation of Nazi Germany.