Two Americans and one Japanese won the Nobel Prize in chemistry yesterday for the discovery and development of a brightly glowing protein first seen in jellyfish, work that has helped scientists study how cancer cells spread.
Japan’s Osamu Shimomura and Americans Martin Chalfie and Roger Tsien shared the prize for their research on green fluorescent protein, or GFP, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said.
The protein is a widely used laboratory tool to illuminate processes in living organisms, such as development of brain cells or the spread of cancer cells.
Shimomura first isolated GFP from a jellyfish found off the west coast of North America in 1962 and discovered that it glowed bright green under ultraviolet light.
In the 1990s, Chalfie showed GFP’s value “as a luminous genetic tag,” while Tsien contributed “to our general understanding of how GFP fluoresces,” the academy said in its citation.
It said that their work has enabled “scientists to follow several different biological processes at the same time.”
That means researchers have been able to use GFP to track nerve cell damage from Alzheimer’s disease or see how insulin-producing beta-cells are created in the pancreas of a growing embryo.
“In one spectacular experiment, researchers succeeded in tagging different nerve cells in the brain of a mouse with a kaleidoscope of colors,” the citation said.
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