Glowing Proteins – A Guiding Star for Biochemistry

Dear Researcher,

In 2008, the Nobel prize in Chemistry was awarded to 3 scientists, Osamu Shimomura, Martin Chalfie and Roger Y. Tsien, “for the discovery and development of the green fluorescent protein or GFP”. The Nobel prize committee described GFP as a ‘guiding star for biochemistry‘, because this protein has become one of the most important tools in bioscience today. GFP is used in many applications such as fusion tagging, transcription reporting, Foerster Resonance Energy Transfer (FRET), biosensors, optogenetics, fluorescence-activated cell sorting (FACS), as well as a general epitope tag for protein purification.

GFP Characteristics

GFP is a 27 kDa monomeric protein, isolated from the jellyfish Aequorea Victoria. Its role is to transduce the blue chemiluminescence of the protein aequorin into green fluorescent light by energy transfer. It has many mutated allelic forms like blue, cyan and yellow and it can be fused to a broad variety of proteins. Tsien's 'A guide to choosing fluorescent proteins' provides useful information on how to choose the best protein for a given experiment.

GFPs main advantage over conventional fluorescent dyes is that it is non-toxic and can be expressed in living cells enabling the study of dynamic, physiological processes. Further, GFP is a small molecule (238 amino acids) and can remain functional even when fused to a target protein, so it allows protein localization to be monitored in real time.

 Antibodies Against GFP