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Fluorescent Protein Research Lands Scientists Nobel Prize
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."
Well, I for one welcome our new fluorescent-green overlords!
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I mean you really could think of this as being the functional equivalent to a trace statement used by a programmer.(Yes, really.) So for example suppose there was a piece of genetic code you were interested in. You might want to know where and when the code was executed. So you slip in the code to generate this glowing protein right next to the code you're interested in. (Just like putting a trace statement in a piece of C++ code you might be interested in.) Then you let the organism live for awhile, in effect running the code and possibly hitting the interesting part. Then bring over the light and look for a glow.(And if you see a glow the code was run and you can even tell where.) We had fruit fly maggots in a cell bio lab where they showed us this. The trace was next to a protein involved with the nervous system. You could tell that because when we looked for the glow their brain and spinal code glowed.) But pretty much any reason you'd put a trace statement in a piece of computer code you can do the same thing with this stuff.