In just three years, the green fluorescent protein (GFP) from the jellyfish Aequorea victoria has vaulted from obscurity to become one of the most widely studied and exploited proteins in biochemistry and cell biology. Its amazing ability to generate a …

1994–1998: Tsien and collaborators made various GFP mutants by genetic modification and structural tweaking. Newly created variants of GFP can shine more brightly and show different colours, such as yellow, cyan, and blue. 2000–2002: Tsien produced monomeric variants of DsRED, which can glow in shades of red, pink, and orange.

High-resolution crystal structures of GFP offer unprecedented opportunities to understand and manipulate the rela- tion between protein structure and spectroscopic function. GFP has become well established as a marker of gene expression and protein targeting in …

2016年8月24日 · Because GFP can be linked to other proteins thanks to genetic engineering, it has become an important tool for studying biological processes in cells. During the 1990s, Roger Y. Tsien elucidated how GFP produces its shimmering light and succeeded in varying the color of the light so that different proteins and multiple, simultaneous biological ...

2008年10月8日 · Roger Tsien and co-workers explained how three amino acids in the peptide backbone of GFP — namely serine, tyrosine and glycine in positions 65, 66 and 67, respectively — react in the presence...

In its light-emitting organs resides the green fluorescent protein, GFP, which glows intensely under ultraviolet light. GFP now revolutionizes the life sciences, and the scientists responsible for its development have been awarded this year’s Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

A postdoc in the Emr lab made GFP fusion constructs to a secreted protein and a lysosomal protein in yeast. Unfortunately, the GFP fluorescence signals were very weak and highly variable from cell to cell. This confirmed that wild-type GFP was too unreliable, so Emr’s lab put GFP aside until it could be sufficiently improved.

Osamu Shimomura painstakingly isolated GFP from hundreds of thousands of jellyfish, characterized the chromophore and elucidated the mechanism of Aequorean bioluminescence. Martin Chalfie expressed the protein in E. coli and C. elegans, and Roger Tsien developed a palette of fluorescent proteins that could be used in a myriad of applications.

通过对GFP编码序列进行各种各样的修改，得到了五颜六色的荧光蛋白，大大地扩展了荧光蛋白在活体成像在生物学方面的研究。 由于在荧光蛋白的发现与发展方面的重要贡献，下村修、Martin Chalfie以及钱永健共同获得了2008年的诺贝尔化学奖。 但是，关于钱永健的趣事，远不止于他的研究领域。 这样一位优秀的天才科学家，在2016年8月24日倏然而逝，当时 Neuron 杂志刊发了钱永健的好友Charles Zuker为他撰写了悼文，回忆了他们两人之间的友谊以及发生在钱永健身 …

While Shimomura, Prasher and Chalfie were all instrumental in taking GFP from the jellyfish and showing that it can be used as a tracer molecule, it is Roger Tsien who is responsible for much of our understanding of how GFP works and for developing new techniques and mutants of GFP.