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: (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: (Score:2)
Considering the other uses underlie much of modern genetics and molecular medical research, maybe not.
Re: (Score:2)
Of course, the south koreans who made those cats were not the people awarded the prize, nor were they the people who discovered or developed GFP, so if anyone's getting an ignoble out of it, it won't be the three who got the prize. Someone else who uses your discovery to stupid ends doesn't make your discovery ridiculous. There are plenty of very valuable studies that have used GFP which make up for it 1000 to 1.
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
I can't help wondering what form of currency I'll be slipping into the straps of fluorescent Korean strippers in 20 years.
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
The remarkable brightly glowing green fluorescent protein, GFP, was first observed in the beautiful jellyfish, Aequorea victoria in 1962. Since then, this protein has become one of the most important tools used in contemporary bioscience. With the aid of GFP, researchers have developed ways to watch processes that were previously invisible, such as the development of nerve cells in the brain or how cancer cells spread.
Tens of thousands of different proteins reside in a living organism, controlling important chemical processes in minute detail. If this protein machinery malfunctions, illness and disease often follow. That is why it has been imperative for bioscience to map the role of different proteins in the body.
This year's Nobel Prize in Chemistry rewards the initial discovery of GFP and a series of important developments which have led to its use as a tagging tool in bioscience. By using DNA technology, researchers can now connect GFP to other interesting, but otherwise invisible, proteins. This glowing marker allows them to watch the movements, positions and interactions of the tagged proteins.
Researchers can also follow the fate of various cells with the help of GFP: nerve cell damage during Alzheimer's disease or how insulin-producing beta cells are created in the pancreas of a growing embryo. In one spectacular experiment, researchers succeeded in tagging different nerve cells in the brain of a mouse with a kaleidoscope of colours.
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2)
Have you seen a confocal microscopy image of a bunch of neurons, each producing a different colour? The fluorescent proteins migrate down the dendrites and mix. You get a rainbow that indicates connectivity. And it's pretty.
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.
Re:Good for them! (Score:5, Informative)
GFP is without a doubt the most commonly used fluorescent tag. It's the workhorse of biological fluorescence microscopy. Given the tens of thousands of publications that have used it, the Nobel prize is certainly deserved.
One of the great things about GFP is that it is a protein. So you can engineer an organism to express GFP. In fact you can engineer the fluorescent protein to be bound to whatever protein you want, just by splicing it into the correct place in the genome. So you can basically make any protein glow. So you can track proteins implicated in cell mobility, or vision, or signaling, or cancer, or some other disease, or whatever.
With modern fluorescent microscopes, you can actually imagine GFP at the single-molecule level. So you can build movies where quite literally you can track individual protein molecules as they move inside a cell. This obviously gives a whole new insight into cellular machinery, and hence everything based on cells (e.g. life and death).
Re: (Score:2)
They made glowing jellyfish! The next prize they will receive will probably be the Ig Nobel Prize in Biology!
They who?!? God? The jellyfish was where the protein was discovered, then they cloned it and co-opted it for use in other things. You have it 100% backwards.
Re:Good for them! (Score:5, Informative)
It sounds silly, but this is one of the great success stories of pure research. GFP has proved to be an absolutely astounding tool for biologists, one that we'd never have if there weren't people curious enough to ask "why does that jellyfish glow?" and people willing to fund them.
I'll cite just one example of this protein being used in a completely novel and extremely powerful way. Fluorescent proteins absorb at one wavelength and emit at another longer wavelength. They've fiddled with the GFP sequence to make yellow and red versions that have overlapping spectra. So now you can tag any two proteins of interest in a cell with GFP and YFP. Next you expose them to light that excites GFP. If the two proteins of interest are closely associated there will be an efficient transfer of energy, and you'll see lots of yellow light emitted. If the proteins of interest are not associated, you'll get mostly green light.
That's right, you can measure the average distance between two proteins with nothing more than 2 fluorescent proteins, a laser and a spectrophotometer. Not only that, but you can do it in a living cell culture, apply pharmaceuticals to the cells and track the change in real time. That's just one of the more amazing uses of GFP, and a great example of why it's so important to fund research with no obvious practical value.
Re:Good for them! (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
Can they get blue as well as green and red?
yes yes yes
Can they be injected into skin cells?
Yes, but you may not want to... and it may not last long
Can the glow be controlled by the nervous system?
I'll say 'not yet' rather than a flat out 'no'.
Which tattoo parlour can give me my glow in the dark thought controlled, full color tattoo?
The tools arent that hard to make but getting your hands on the (G)/(R)/(B)/FP is slightly harder... I have them in my lab ;-)
Just give me...
1) these [davidson.edu] (check),
2) a template mask -one for each colour (easy enough [google.com.au])
3) And the GFP in the appropriate DNA vector [clontech.com],
4) ???
5) profit
6) and i can paint with 1" dots a tattoo...
I am ***SO*** doing this on the next plant I shoot [cornell.edu] (not my pic), I only use G(reen
Re: (Score:2)
Oh no! I've created a monster!
Re: (Score:2)
Not really. There was a piece on NPR this morning on the guy, Douglas Prasher, who actually discovered the gene that makes this protein. (The winners came up with a way to use his gene) His funding was cut and he's now driving
Re:Well.... (Score:4, Funny)
You're not even trying, are you?
Actually, he is very trying.
Re: (Score:1)
Thanks! :-P
Re: (Score:1)
Us old timers gotta keep you newbies in line :)
Re: (Score:1, Funny)
Whose a 'newbie'? I remember Slashdot before it even had moderation. Or user accounts.
Now get off my lawn.
Damn! (Score:2)
Re:Damn! (Score:4, Funny)
I thought my BBQ sauce was going to win the Nobel Prize for Chemistry :(
Everyone knows that BBQ sauce goes under the peace category.
Re: (Score:1)
Everyone knows that BBQ sauce goes under the peace category.
That greatly depends on how spicy said BBQ actually is ...
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
I thought my BBQ sauce was going to win the Nobel Prize for Chemistry :(
Well if your BBQ sauce glowed green, in a nontoxic way, then you would have won. ;-)
Well.... (Score:1)
The committee gave them a glowing recommendation....
They must be glowing with happiness.... .....
Green Eggs and Ham (Score:1)
These guys gave us the frabjous green pigs [google.com], for which all Dr Seuss fans should be quite thankful.
But more seriously, the GFP gene is amazingly useful in genetic research. Personally I would have given them the Nobel in Biology rather than Chemistry.
Re: (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: (Score:3, Insightful)
When Nobel was creating the prizes biology had more in common with being a librarian than it did with what we think of as biology today.
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
so i guess it evens out, and besides, there's no price for biologists
Cool! Biologists are free as in beer! Can I have 10, please? Oh, and can you make them female? And cute, too.
Re: (Score:1, Insightful)
First, there is no Nobel Prize for biology. The closest related fields are "chemistry" and "physiology or medicine."
Second, it is truly sad that a relatively trivial technique, rather than a grand idea or discovery is awarded the Nobel Prize. The Prize should be given to those who actually advance the knowledge of the field and provide a breakthrough that leaves us all gaping in amazement, not the engineers that build the tools to do the investigations. It is an unfortunate commentary on how trivial rese
Re: (Score:1, Informative)
Relatively trivial? Tsien's work on expanding the spectra at which fluorescent proteins emit has been anything but. He and his lab pretty much figured out the chemistry by which normally non-fluorescent amino acids are modified post-translationally (after the protein has been made inside the cell) to create a chain of conjugated Pi electrons (ie several double bonds one after the other). This had never been seen in other proteins. Then he took the backbone of the protein and modified the amino acid sequ
Re:Green Eggs and Ham (Score:4, Informative)
Re: (Score:2)
It's been pretty common practice, especially in the last couple decades, to consider advances in biochemistry/molecular biology as eligible for the Nobel in Chemistry.
Which is a good way to approach it, considering that chemistry is mostly solved anyway. Pretty much anything that would be worthy of a Nobel in chemistry would be equally or better suited for a Nobel in physics.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
I wouldn't go quite that far, at least not yet. Looking at the last ten Chemistry Nobels, it's about 50-50 between molecular biology and the rest of chemistry. Last year's prize went for work in surface catalysis, 2005 went to the olefin metathesis guys, 2001 was for chiral syntheses, 2000 was for conductive polymers, 1999 was for femtosecond kinetics, and 1998 was for quantum chemistry.
I'll grant that chemistry doesn't have the big questions to solve like physics does, but there are still substantial d
Cool (Score:1)
any green glowing food coming for halloween?
Re: (Score:2)
any green glowing food coming for halloween?
Gummy Bears under blacklights?
Re: (Score:2)
GFP is a protein, gummy bears on the other hand are completely inorganic goo.
Re: (Score:2)
GFP is a protein, gummy bears on the other hand are completely inorganic goo.
They're a gelatinous suspension of sugar. As you saying sugar is inorganic?
(Actually, in most US states they're probably high fructose corn syrup.)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
So substitute GFP for boiled animal joints et voila phosphorescent gummis.
Re: (Score:2)
woooooosh. Didn't realize there were so many fans of gummy bears!
Gellatin is used probably because when you boil it it becomes denatured and can bind with other mollecules to make a net, similar to albumin from eggs. GFP can denature too, but that destroys it's structure and fluroescence. I'm not sure it would congeal the same, but it wouldn't still glow.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Tried that, nix. So far I haven't found a brand of candy that glows under UV.
Darn. Would have been good, especially for Gummy Worms.
Have you checked SweetTarts Sours or other sour candies? That outer sour coating might twinkle.
I guess for glowing under UV you'll need something with a UV-reactive wrapper.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
any green glowing food coming for halloween?
maybe not... but you could be putting a GFP fish [google.com.au] under a glowing Xmas tree [google.com.au] (not GFP, but still cool)
Glowing food (Score:2)
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:1)
No, no. The Nobel Prize wasn't actually established by Alfred Nobel, it was actually established by his brother Ig. Everyone knows that.
Nobel for Slurm!! (Score:1)
Prior Art! (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
Well, they didn't patent the GFP mollecule. I think Tsien may have patented some derivatives that he developed which aren't found in nature, but the original GFP is not.
don't give them the money (Score:5, Funny)
Hold onto the cash until they successfully splice it into the mosquito's DNA. Glowing mosquito == dead mosquito!
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.
interesting protein (Score:2)
Some 36 years ago, in another life as a physiologist, I used this protein, also known as Aquorin as an means to monitor the rise and fall of the intracellular calcium ion concentrations in invertebrate muscle. Aquorin fluoresces in the presence of very low levels of calcium ions and was used as one of the means to show that these ions were responsible for triggering muscle contraction. However, the experiments were very difficult to do, Aquorin was very expensive and the success rate of the experiments wa
Awesome (Score:1)
Now let's see them insert the gene into a chameleon and see what it'll do...
So, Fluorescent Proteine You Say. (Score:1)
Can I swallow GFP to get glow-in-the-dark jizz?
Poor link choice? (Score:3, Insightful)
GFP Sequence (Score:1)
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:1)
That sounds like the sort of code an idiot would have on his luggage!
Additional colors available, (Score:1)
The guy who discovered the gene (Score:3, Interesting)