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第38回日本分子生物学会年会・
April 2014
精巧な八重畳の縁で魅せる体節形成の妙技
“Yaedatami” or an eightfold straw mat is a tatami specially prepared for use in religious services. A craftsman folds “tatamiomote” or woven soft rush straws with edging of specially designed Nishijin brocade several times over so as to perfectly align patterns of creases of the folded edgings. We use the design to schematically illustrate the somitogenesis in vertebrates. As the U-shaped presomitic mesoderm moves tailward, periodic waves of gene expression form pairs of somites one after another from the anterior end. “Oshitone” or the top cushion has a mark of an embryo woven into it. If you carefully look at the edging of “oshitone”, you can find it bears the process of segmentation in Drosophila, a species which forms all of its segments simultaneously. Cooperated by Isogaki Tatami (Kyoto, Japan).
March 2014
二人で共鳴し梅の枝を照らす
FRET (Fluorescence Resonance Energy Transfer), which is a phenomenon of energy transfer between two adjacent fluorescent molecules, has been applied to visualization of interaction between proteins in living cells and so on. To carry out high-efficiency FRET, not only the distance between two molecules must be very close (less than about 10 nm) but the relative orientation of two chromophores must also be optimized. One of the women in this picture carries the other with attention paid on how they are oriented to each other, and successfully lightens the plum blossoms just like FRET.
