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Fluorescent Protein Research Lands Scientists Nobel Prize

Posted by timothy on from the also-will-change-dinner-forever dept.

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."

7 of 79 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Good for them! by virtualXTC · · 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

  2. Re:Good for them! by Wiarumas · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I would also like to add that they can use different colors (other than green) so they can observe several processes at once. Pretty neat stuff.

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  3. Re:Green Eggs and Ham by Markspark · · Score: 2, Interesting

    yeah.. me too, so i started looking, and a lot of the guys who received nobel prices in physics, got it for discoveries i for one consider chemistry.. such as Rayleigh, Pauli, and some others.
    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/

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    i find your lack of faith in science disturbing!
  4. Re:Good for them! by philspear · · Score: 4, 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

    http://bioephemera.com/2007/11/13/the-brainbow-mouse/

    http://www.boston.com/news/globe/health_science/articles/2006/11/06/microscope_renaissance/

    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.

  5. Glofish by PoitNarf · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I think this is the same protein used in Glofish:
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GloFish

    Got some here in our tank at work, they're pretty cool to look at.

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  6. Re:Cool by idontgno · · Score: 2, Interesting
    More to the point, they're gelatinous because they're made of gelatin. Which is protein.

    So substitute GFP for boiled animal joints et voila phosphorescent gummis.

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  7. The guy who discovered the gene by Maximum+Prophet · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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 a courtesy car for a car dealership in Alabama.

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