Discovery
The exosome was first discovered as an RNase in 1997 in the budding yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae, an often-used model organism. Not long after, in 1999, it was realized that the exosome was in fact the yeast equivalent of an already described complex in human cells called the PM/Scl complex, which had been identified as an autoantigen in patients with certain autoimmune diseases years earlier (see below). Purification of this "PM/Scl complex" allowed the identification of more human exosome proteins and eventually the characterization of all components in the complex. In 2001, the increasing amount of genome data that had become available allowed the prediction of exosome proteins in archaea, although it would take another 2 years before the first exosome complex from an archaeal organism was purified.
Read more about this topic: Exosome Complex
Famous quotes containing the word discovery:
“He is not a true man of science who does not bring some sympathy to his studies, and expect to learn something by behavior as well as by application. It is childish to rest in the discovery of mere coincidences, or of partial and extraneous laws. The study of geometry is a petty and idle exercise of the mind, if it is applied to no larger system than the starry one.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“We early arrive at the great discovery that there is one mind common to all individual men: that what is individual is less than what is universal ... that error, vice and disease have their seat in the superficial or individual nature.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“It was one of those evenings when men feel that truth, goodness and beauty are one. In the morning, when they commit their discovery to paper, when others read it written there, it looks wholly ridiculous.”
—Aldous Huxley (1894–1963)