Three share Nobel chemistry prize

One Japanese and two American scientists share the honour for discovering and developing the green protein GFP.

STOCKHOLM, SWEDEN // The Japanese scientist Osamu Shimomura and Americans Martin Chalfie and Roger Tsien won the Nobel Prize in chemistry today for their discovery and development of the green fluorescent protein, GFP. The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said they shared the prize for the discovery and development of GFP, which was first seen in jellyfish. The protein is a widely used laboratory tool to illuminate processes in living organisms, such as development of brain cells or the spread of cancer cells.

Dr Shimomura first isolated GFP from a jellyfish found off the west coast of North America and discovered that it glowed bright green under ultraviolet light. In the 1990s, Dr Chalfie showed GFP's value "as a luminous genetic tag," while Dr Tsien contributed "to our general understanding of how GFP fluoresces," the academy said in its citation. It said that their work has enabled "scientists to follow several different biological processes at the same time".

That means that researchers have been able to use GFP to track nerve cell damage from Alzheimer's disease or see how insulin-producing beta-cells are created in the pancreas of a growing embryo. "In one spectacular experiment, researchers succeeded in tagging different nerve cells in the brain of a mouse with a kaleidoscope of colours," the citation said. *AP