常時英心:言葉の森から 1.0

約10年間,はてなダイアリーで英語表現の落穂拾いを行ってきました。現在はAmeba Blogに2.0を開設し,継続中です。こちらはしばらくアーカイブとして維持します。

vesicle

今年も日本からノベール賞受賞者がでました。

Yoshinori Ohsumi of Japan Wins Nobel Prize in Medicine

Yoshinori Ohsumi, a Japanese cell biologist, was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine on Monday for his discoveries on how cells recycle their content, a process known as autophagy.

Autophagy, derived from the Greek, means “self-eating.”

“This concept emerged during the 1960s, when researchers first observed that the cell could destroy its own contents by enclosing it in membranes, forming sacklike vesicles that were transported to a recycling compartment, called the lysosome, for degradation,” the Nobel Assembly at Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm said in announcing the prize.

In a series of experiments in the early 1990s, Dr. Ohsumi used baker’s yeast to identify genes essential for autophagy, and he went on to examine the underlying mechanisms of the process.

“Ohsumi’s discoveries led to a new paradigm in our understanding of how the cell recycles its content,” the Nobel Assembly said. “His discoveries opened the path to understanding the fundamental importance of autophagy in many physiological processes, such as in the adaptation to starvation or response to infection.”

Mutations in autophagy genes can cause disease, the assembly said, and disruptions in autophagy have been linked to Parkinson’s disease, Type 2 diabetes and cancer.

(以下省略)

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/04/science/yoshinori-ohsumi-nobel-prize-medicine.html?ribbon-ad-idx=5&rref=science&module=Ribbon&version=context®ion=Header&action=click&contentCollection=Science&pgtype=article

今回取り上げる単語は、vesicleです。

ジーニアス英和辞典』(第五版,大修館)で調べたところ、「小嚢,小胞,(火山岩の)気孔」などと載っておりました。

Oxford Dictionary of English (Second Edition Reserved, Oxford University Press)によると、医学用語で “a small fluid-filled bladder, sac, cyst, or vacuole within the body”とのことでした。

ちなみに小嚢とは別名「球形嚢(きゅうけいのう)」と呼ばれ、脊椎動物の平衡器である前庭器官の一部だそうです。(『旺文社 生物辞典』,五訂版)(Gomez)