Copi

Raúl Damonte Botana (November 20, 1939, Buenos Aires – December 14, 1987, Paris), better known by the nom de plume Copi (for "copito de nieve", Spanish for "little snowflake"), was an Argentine writer, cartoonist, and playwright who spent most of his career in Paris.

Biography

Damonte spent most of his youth in Montevideo. His maternal grandfather was the journalist Natalio Félix Botana and his father was the journalist Raúl Damonte Taborda, an antiperonist Radical politician and director of the journal Tribuna Popular. Raúl showed an early talent for drawing and, from his adolescence, contributed caricatures to his father's publication and to the satirical magazine Tía Vicenta.

His father's political activities forced the family into exile in Uruguay, Haiti, and later New York. He finally settled in Paris, where he embarked on a career as a cartoonist for such newspapers as Le Nouvel Observateur. His most notable character during this period was La Femme assise, The Sitting Woman.

He was a member of Tse, an association of Franco-Argentine artists with whom in 1969 he staged a biographical play about Eva Perón. His theatrical works, influenced by Samuel Beckett, are characterized by the failure of characters to communicate.

COPI

COPI is a protein complex that coats vesicles transporting proteins from the cis end of the Golgi complex back to the rough endoplasmic reticulum (ER), where they were originally synthesized, and between Golgi compartments. This type of transport is termed as retrograde transport, in contrast to the anterograde transport associated with the COPII protein. The name "COPI" refers to the specific coat protein complex that initiates the budding process on the cis-Golgi membrane. The coat consists of large protein subcomplexes that are made of seven different protein subunits.

Coat proteins

Coat protein, or COPI, is an ADP ribosylation factor (ARF)-dependent adaptor protein involved in membrane traffic. COPI was first identified in retrograde traffic from the cis-Golgi to the rough endoplasmic reticulum (ER) and is the most extensively studied of ARF-dependent adaptors. COPI consists of seven subunits which compose the heptameric protein complex.

The primary function of adaptors is the selection of cargo proteins for their incorporation into nascent carriers. In the case of the adaptor COPI, cargo containing the sorting motif KKXX interact with COPI to form carriers which are transported from the cis-Golgi to the rough ER. Current views suggest that ARFs are also involved in the selection of cargo for incorporation into carriers.