Osamu Shimomura, Martin Chalfie and Roger Tsien awarded Nobel Prize

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for 2008 jointly to Osamu Shimomura, Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL), Woods Hole, MA and Boston University Medical School, MA, Martin Chalfie, Columbia University, New York, NY, and Roger Y. Tsien, Howard Hughes Medical Institute, University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, CA for the discovery and development of the green fluorescent protein, GFP.

Martin Chalfie uses the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans to investigate aspects of nerve cell development and function. His current work focuses on the study of a set of six neurons that are the sensory receptors for gentle touch (the touch cells), to address two questions: 1) How is neuronal cell fate determined? and 2) What is the molecular basis of mechanosensation (e.g., touch, hearing, and balance)? Facilitating these studies is the development of new experimental methods, such as green fluorescent protein (GFP) as a gene and protein marker and a novel method to generate subtractive cDNA libraries.

GFP has functioned in the past decade as a guiding star for biochemists, biologists, medical scientists and other researchers. Martin Chalfie was one of three to receive the 2008 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the initial discovery of GFP and a series of important developments which led to its use as a tagging tool in bioscience. Chalfie demonstrated the value of GFP as a luminous genetic tag for various biological phenomena.

Chalfie joined the Whitney Laboratory's Board of Scientific Advisors in 2007 and will serve until 2011. He is a great asset to the Lab, offering wise guidance and advice in all aspects of the Laboratory's operation. Congratulations and best wishes go out to Dr. Chalfie from everyone at the Whitney Lab! Dr. Chalfie will deliver the Whitney Laboratory Lecture in Gainesville on December 1 and at the Whitney Lab on December 2.

Roger Tsien was a Whitney Lecturer and the advisor of our own David Zacharias when he was a postdoc in Tsien's lab. Everyone at the Whitney Lab congratulates Dr. Tsien and wishes him much success in his future endeavors!

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