Glowing Proteins Win Noble Prize

October 08, 2008

Imagine you are at an outdoor gathering. It's pitch dark. There are thousands of people and you cannot make out heads from tails. One person, however, is walking through the crowd holding a sparkler. Everyone else seems practically invisible but the person and the sparkler stand out perfectly from the rest.

This is what it was like for scientists trying to observe proteins functioning in cells. It was like they were looking down on a crowd of activity occurring undercover of night. But then Osamu Shimomura of the Marine Biological Laboratory at Woods Hole, MA, and Boston University Medical School, MA came along. He isolated a green fluorescent protein from the bioluminescent jellyfish Aequorea victoria, which lives off the west coast of North America. The protein glows bright green under ultraviolet light.

Martin Chalfie of Columbia University in New York developed a way to attach the green fluorescing protein to otherwise invisible proteins in cells. With this advancement scientists could watch the movements, positions and interactions of tagged proteins. They could watch, for example, nerve cells growing or cancer cells spreading.

Roger Tsien of the University of California, San Diego, CA expanded the color palette from green to other colors, which allows scientists to watch several different biological processes at the same time.

So, "for the discovery and development of the green fluorescent protein, GFP" these three scientists were awarded this year's Nobel Prize in chemistry.

Photo: KEYSTONE/Georgios Kefalas