Nobel Prize awarded for tracer protein

Published Wednesday, October 8, 2008

STOCKHOLM, Sweden (AP) - Two Americans and a U.S.-based Japanese scientist won the Nobel Prize in chemistry today for discovering and developing a glowing jellyfish protein that sheds light on such key processes as the spread of cancer inside living organisms.

Japan’s Osamu Shimomura and Americans Martin Chalfie and Roger Tsien shared the prize for their work on green fluorescent protein, or GFP, first found in jellyfish, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said.

Researchers worldwide now use GFP to track processes like the development of brain cells, the growth of bacteria or development of disease. It has let them study nerve cell damage from Alzheimer’s disease and see how insulin-producing beta cells arise in the pancreas of a growing embryo, for example.

The academy compared the impact of GFP on science to the invention of the microscope. For the past decade, the academy said, the protein has been "a guiding star for biochemists, biologists, medical scientists and other researchers."

When exposed to ultraviolet light, the protein glows green. So it can act as a tracer to expose the movements of other, invisible proteins it is attached to as they go about their business. It can also be used to mark particular cells in a tissue and show when and where particular genes turn on and off.

Shimomura and a colleague found GFP in material they extracted from about 10,000 jellyfish they had recovered off the coast of the state of Washington in the United States. They reported in 1962 that it glowed bright green under ultraviolet light.