Nobel prize for discovery of glowing protein

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By Clive Cookson    

Two Americans and a Japanese have won the Nobel chemistry prize for discovering the glowing proteins that have become an essential tool in biomedical research.

Osamu Shimomura, a Japanese citizen who has worked in the US for almost 50 years, originally extracted “green fluorescent protein” or GFP from bioluminescent jellyfish at Princeton University in the early 1960s.

Martin Chalfie of Columbia University, New York, showed how to use GFP as a luminous genetic tag for various biological phenomena. In one of his first experiments, he made individual cells in the roundworm Caenorhabditis elegans glow with the aid of GFP.

Roger Tsien of the University of California, San Diego, contributed to the scientific understanding of how GFP fluoresces and extended the colour palette beyond green. This enables researchers to paint various molecules and living cells different colours, so they can follow several biological processes at the same time.

The three scientists receive equal shares of the SKr10m ($1.4m) prize.

Today whole animals can be made to glow. Consumers in Asia and north American can buy genetically modified GloFish in “Starfire Red, Electric Green and Sunburst Orange” for their aquarium.

More serious scientific applications involve watching processes that were previously invisible, such as nerve cells developing in the brain or cancer cells spreading.

Tens of thousands of different proteins control the biochemical processes in a living organism. If this protein machinery malfunctions, disease may follow. So scientists need tags such as GFP to map the role of different proteins in the body.

By using gene-splicing technology, researchers can connect GFP to other proteins. This fluorescent marker allows them to watch the movements, positions and interactions of the tagged proteins.

Researchers can follow the fate of various cells with the help of GFP - for example nerve cell damage during Alzheimer’s disease or how insulin-producing 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,” the Nobel citation said.


 



Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2008 Published: October 8 2008 11:03 | Last updated: October 8 2008 11:37