Biotech's 'Luminous Protein' Bags Nobel Prize for Chemistry

Americans Martin Chalfie and Roger Tsien and Japan’s Osamu Shimomura won this year’s Nobel Prize in chemistry for the discovery and development of the green florescent protein (GFP), a tool that has revolutionized genetic engineering and biomedical research by providing a way to track the activity of individual proteins within a living cell, and thereby monitor how genes are expressed.

Shimomura first isolated the protein from the glowing jellyfish Aequorea victoria in the early 1960s. Chalfie, of Columbia University in New York, engineered it into bacteria and round worms in 1992 and Tsien tweaked the protein to produce different colored analogues, allowing scientists to study the expression of many different genes at the same time.

The use of GFP is ubiquitous in many fields of biochemistry and biology. The fluorescent protein has been used to monitor processes in living organisms previously invisible, such as the spread of cancer cells, development of neurons, progression of diseases such as Alzheimer's, and even the spread of AIDS virus. GFP has also been used as a reporter gene to select transgenic events during plant transformation. It is now even possible to buy glowing pets thanks to the protein. Zebra fish, genetically engineered to contain GFP, are widely available. Scientists have also developed green fluorescent tobacco plants, flies, mice and even pigs.

For more information, read http://www.nature.com/news/2008/081008/full/news.2008.1159.html or http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/322/5900/361