The 2008 Nobel Prize for Chemistry
This year's Chemistry Prize to Osamu Shimomura, Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL), Woods Hole, Martin Chalfie, Columbia University, and Roger Y. Tsien, University of California, San Diego, is for the discovery and development of green fluorescent protein. The fluorescent protein was discovered in a Pacific jellyfish and has since become a powerful tool in biology. Moving the gene into other animals allows them to be made fluorescent. For instance green fluorescent monkeys have been "engineered" but usually it is put into microbes or plants. By coupling this gene to other genes of interest, the GFP can be used as a marker. The organism becomes fluorescent whenever the coupled gene is activated. Thus yeast containing the GFP gene coupled to a gene for metabolizing a specific sugar will glow whenever that sugar is provided and the system turns on.
