ABSTRACT
The acronym “rab” was first used in 1987 when four additional members of the ras gene family were isolated from a rat brain cDNA library by means of synthetic oligonucleotide probes. 1 It was observed that these mammalian rab genes constituted a distinct branch of the ras superfamily, more closely related to two genes discovered in Saccharomyces cerevisiae: the YPT1 gene found serendipitously in 1983 by Gallwitz et al. 2 and the newly characterized SEC4 gene involved in yeast secretion. 3
