To celebrate and honor today's Nobel in Chemistry here is a video highlighting the focus of the awards research on Green Fluorescent Protein. The three men who will split the 1.5 Million dollar prize discovered and further developed the usefulness of GFP.
Osamu Shimomura isolated a single protein like a needle in a haystack. This adventure was even harderer than I made that sound. For starters, the jellyfish that the scientists were working with was relatively unknown to the biological community and consequently no funding was available to do the work. Martin Chalfie, a C.elegans researcher, shameless plug for the best model organism ;), realized that this proteins potential would be endless if he could splice the gene and express it in a living organism. In 1994 he and his lab provided the first evidence that this was possible in an article published in Science. As with most tools in science GFP was further "optimized" by Roger Tsien who altered the chemical structure of the protein to excite different wavelengths and produce a family of proteins that can produce all the colors of the rainbow.
Enjoy the video! I'm starting to make my own GFP worms, I'll have to post some pics when I'm done cloning.
GFP pigs and fish
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