FRAP (Chile)

The FRAP (Spanish: Frente de Acción Popular, Popular Action Front) was a Chilean left-wing coalition of parties from 1956 to 1969. It presented twice a common candidate, Salvador Allende, for the 1958 and the 1964 presidential elections. Succeeding to the FRENAP formed the preceding year, the FRAP itself was succeeded by the Popular Unity coalition.

Composition of the coalition

The FRAP succeeded to the FRENAP (Frente Nacional del Pueblo, People's National Front), formed the following year by a coalition of the Socialist Party (PS) and the Communist Party (PCCh). The new coalition, created on February 28, 1956, as a platform of movements struggling for an "anti-imperialist, anti-oligarch and anti-feudal program." Apart from the Socialist and the Communist parties, the FRAP included: the Popular Socialist Party (until its merger in 1957 with the PS; the People's Democratic Party (Partido Demócrático del Pueblo), which merged in 1960 with the PS to form the PADENA (which in turn withdrew itself from the FRAP coalition in 1965); the Vanguardia Nacional del Pueblo (National Vanguard of the People), which had been created in 1958 from a merger of minor groups such as the Labour Party (1953) and others; and the Social Democracy, founded in 1965.

Mechanistic target of rapamycin

The mechanistic target of rapamycin, also known as mammalian target of rapamycin (MTOR) or FK506-binding protein 12-rapamycin-associated protein 1 (FRAP1), is a protein that in humans is encoded by the MTOR gene. MTOR is a serine/threonine protein kinase that regulates cell growth, cell proliferation, cell motility, cell survival, protein synthesis, autophagy, and transcription. MTOR belongs to the phosphatidylinositol 3-kinase-related kinase protein family.

Discovery

MTOR was first named as the mammalian target of rapamycin. Rapamycin was discovered in a soil sample from Easter Island, known locally as Rapa Nui, in the 1970s. The bacterium Streptomyces hygroscopicus, isolated from that sample, produces an antifungal that researchers named rapamycin after the island.

Rapamycin arrests fungal activity at the G1 phase of the cell cycle. In mammals, it suppresses the immune system by blocking the G1 to S phase transition in T-lymphocytes. Thus, it is used as an immunosuppressant following organ transplantation.