Fluorescent Protein Research Lands Scientists Nobel Prize 79
Iddo Genuth writes "The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has announced three recipients of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry award for 2008: jointly given to Osamu Shimomura, Martin Chalfie and Roger Y. Tsien 'for the discovery and development of the green fluorescent protein, GFP' — a remarkable brightly glowing green fluorescent protein first observed in the beautiful jellyfish, Aequorea victoria, in 1962."
Re:Good for them! (Score:3, Interesting)
...The next prize they will receive will probably be the Ig Nobel Prize in Biology!
Well, actually considering one of it's uses, I wouldn't be suprised: glowing cats [itchmo.com]
Re:Good for them! (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Green Eggs and Ham (Score:3, Interesting)
so i guess it evens out, and besides, there's no price for biologists. and as some wise cartoonist once put it, Biology is just applied physics http://xkcd.com/435/ [xkcd.com]
Re:Good for them! (Score:5, Interesting)
There was a project with the goal to make a mouse that expressed a variety of different fluorophores in it's neurons so that you could tell one neuron from another, watch active processes, and so on.
The best part is the name: the brainbow mouse
http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/multimedia/2007/10/gallery_fluorescentneurons [wired.com]
http://bioephemera.com/2007/11/13/the-brainbow-mouse/ [bioephemera.com]
http://www.boston.com/news/globe/health_science/articles/2006/11/06/microscope_renaissance/ [boston.com]
I think some of Tsien's work is more interesting, I believe he's made some fluorophores that you can turn on and off, or convert to different colors to identify specific cells, in addition to some dyes which fluoresce only in the presence of calcium.
Glofish (Score:3, Interesting)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GloFish [wikipedia.org]
Got some here in our tank at work, they're pretty cool to look at.
Re:Cool (Score:3, Interesting)
So substitute GFP for boiled animal joints et voila phosphorescent gummis.
The guy who discovered the gene (Score:3, Interesting)