I would first like to thank the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences and the Nobel Foundation for awarding me this honour, of which I had never even dreamt. I was born in 1940, the son of a furniture craftsman in the city of Nagoya, in Japan. My father wanted to change his job and was taking a correspondence course to become an electrical engineer, while he was a trainee furniture craftsman. Howev...

despite the few data about mardâs in shâhnâme, the very high attention of scholars to him and his name is indebted to the importance of his son, zahhâk, in iranian mythology. the lack of any information about this personality in avesta, ambiguity of written forms of his name in pahlavi script in middle persian texts, multiplicity of the recorded forms in islamic texts and also the similarity of...

Karl Heinz Rechinger was born on October 16, 1906 at Vienna (Austria). He was the only son of Dr. Karl Rechinger and Rosa Elisabeth Rechinger née Favarger. His father was also a plant taxonomist. The principal focus of K.H. Rechinger was flora writing. He was the author of Flora Aegaea and founder and editor of "Flora Iranica". In 1929, Rechinger started to work as an unpaid volunteer in the De...

The intromission of the male’s long, flexible, threadlike phallus into the female’s similarly long, thin, S-shaped vagina in tephritid flies is mechanically challenging. The male of the Mediterranean fruit fly, Ceratitis capitata (Wiedemann, 1824), folds the basal portion of his phallus back on itself, inserts the folded portion into the female, and then gradually unfolds his phallus inside her...

BACKGROUND A versatile strategy for protein-surface coupling in biochips exploits the affinity for polyhistidine of the nitrilotriacetic acid (NTA) group loaded with Ni(II). Methods based on optical reflectivity measurements such as spectroscopic ellipsometry (SE) allow for label-free, non-invasive monitoring of molecule adsorption/desorption at surfaces. RESULTS This paper describes a SE stu...

Here we describe a generic procedure for the expression and purification of milligram quantities of functional recombinant eukaryotic integral membrane proteins, exemplified by hexahistidine-tagged bovine rhodopsin. These quantities were obtained with the recombinant baculovirus/Sf9 insect cell-based expression system in large-scale bioreactor cultures with the use of a serum-free and protein-f...

The crystal structure of a mutant form of the single-chain fragment (scFv), derived from the monoclonal anti-His tag antibody 3D5, in complex with a hexahistidine peptide has been determined at 2.7 A resolution. The peptide binds to a deep pocket formed at the interface of the variable domains of the light and the heavy chain, mainly through hydrophobic interaction to aromatic residues and hydr...

The cDNA of the human GM2-activator protein was cloned into the expression vector pHX17. The plasmid encodes a fusion protein with a hexahistidine tail and a Factor Xa cleavage site at its N-terminus. The recombinant protein was purified from cell homogenates under denaturing conditions by metal-ion affinity chromatography in a single step and then was refolded. The hexahistidine tail could be ...