Thursday, October 9, 2008
GFP!
For those of you who don't know, the nobel prize in Chemistry went to the scientists who isolated GFP and figured out how to use it in molecular biology. GFP or, green fluorescent protein, was isolated from jelly fish and is now used all the time to make things glow. I've already used it twice this week! It's a very useful tool to help verify that something is happening that you can't visually detect. For example, one of my projects is to try and express a gene in breast cancer cells. To do that we insert the gene, but we don't know how long it takes to express so in the next dish we insert GFP and however long it takes for the cells to glow green (or express GFP) is approximately the time it takes to express our gene. Frankly, I was really surprised this didn't already have the nobel prize around it, these people truly deserve it for the work they've done. For a quick media blurb, check out http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/09/science/09nobel.html?_r=1&oref=slogin.
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3 comments:
This is indeed fantastic news! I was also shocked that these guys hadn't gotten a noble prize yet, given the ubiquity of GFP in science.
What are you working on that's going to win you a noble prize? I'm already telling people that you're going to be famous, now I want to tell them what you're going to be famous for.
haha! Remember my plan to cure cancer during grad school?
Okay, so how does it light up? Do you have to shine a certain frequency of light on it or something?
That seeme like a badass protein. Other fluorescent things are kinda radioactive, right? What makes this thing so special?
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