GFP - transforming molecular biology

One Japanese and two American scientists won this year’s Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2008 for taking the ability of some jellyfish to glow green and transforming it into a ubiquitous tool of molecular biology to watch the dance of living cells and the proteins within them.
Osamu Shimomura, an emeritus professor at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Mass. and Boston University Medical School, Martin Chalfie of Columbia University, and Roger Y. Tsien of the University of California, San Diego, will share the $1.4 million prize awarded by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.

The green fluorescent protein, or G.F.P. for short, was observed in 1962 in the jellyfish Aequorea victoria, which drifts in the ocean currents off the west coast of North America.
Dr. Shimomura was able to identify the protein and showed that it glowed bright green under ultraviolet light.
Dr. Chalfie showed how the protein could be used as a biological identifier tag by inserting the gene that produces the protein into the DNA of an organism.
In an early experiment, he inserted the protein into six cells of a transparent roundworm. When placed under ultraviolet light, those cells glowed green, revealing their location.
Dr. Tsien was able to make glowing proteins of colors other than green, allowing biologists to track different cellular processes at the same time.

Biologists now routinely use green fluorescent proteins for tracking the growth and fate of specific cells like nerve cells damaged by Alzheimer’s disease.