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The Nobel Prize in Chemistry and the Beauty of Fluorescent Protein

Posted on October 08, 2008

This year s Nobel Prize in Chemistry went to three guys who discovered and developed something called green fluorescent protein. A Nobel Prize for anything green and fluorescent calls for a little visual storytelling, so we put together this slide show.The tale starts with Osamu Shimomura gathering thousands of jellyfish off the coast of North America in the early 1960s in order to isolate the protein that causes them to emit fluorescent light under ultraviolet rays.Several decades later, the geneticist Martin Chalfie and his colleagues spliced the gene for GFP into C. elegans, the tiny worm...

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cancer , protein , proteins