Oct 8, 2008

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Wide range of applications in biosafety research

Nobel Prize for fluorescent protein

Two American and one Japanese scientist have been chosen to receive this year’s Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their discovery of a green fluorescent protein (GFP) in a jellyfish. GFP is not only used in medical research to make biological processes visible, but also in plant research. The Nobel Committee in Stockholm based its decision on the fact that the discovery of GFP and its application possibilities have been vital for the development of contemporary bioscience.

Potatoes: GFP shows where a particular protein is expressed.

Tobacco shoot: Here GFP is used in such a way that it becomes active only if the marker gene has been removed.

Grapevines: GFP indicates that a marker gene has been removed as intended.

Microinjection of DNA into the nucleus of a plant cell. The fluorescence indicates that GFP is being expressed.

In 1961 the Japanese prize winner, Osamu Shimomura, isolated a protein in the jellyfish Aequorea victoria that glows green under ultraviolet light. The two American researchers, Martin Chalfie and Roder Tsien, later discovered that this green fluorescent protein (GFP) could be used in a number of different ways to observe directly the spatial and temporal distribution of a particular protein in cells or organisms. If the GFP gene is connected to the gene of another protein, the GFP acts as a fluorescent marker for the other protein, which would otherwise be invisible. Unlike other fluorescent proteins, GFP does not need any other molecules to make it glow – UV light is enough. Moreover, GFP is non-toxic in almost all cells and has no effects on the other processes in the cell.

Especially in cell biology, this marking technique has played a key role in identifying processes within cells, such as the transport and regulation of certain proteins. In medical research, it can be used e.g. to follow the development of nerve cells or the growth of cancer cells.

But the GFP technique is also frequently used in molecular plant research, especially in the development of new plant transformation methods. In some biosafety research projects funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) the GFP gene is used as a test system to enable researchers to tell quickly and easily whether the DNA introduced by new methods is active in the plant cell and whether it leads to the associated protein being produced. GFP can also act as a visual indicator to show whether a particular gene has been successfully removed, as in the case of an unwanted antibiotic-resistance marker gene that is supposed to be removed from the genome.

In other research projects the GFP gene was connected to another protein to make its spatial distribution within the cell or plant visible.