Editorial

Published online in Wiley Interscience: 2009

(www.interscience.wiley.com) DOI 10.1002/bio.1113

Luminescence 2009; 24: 1 Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

1

John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.Scientists awarded Nobel Prize for work with GFPOn 8 October 2008, Professor Gunnar Öquist, Secretary Generalof the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, announced that the2008 Nobel Prize in Chemistry had been awarded for the initialdiscovery of Green Fluorescent Protein (GFP) and a series ofimportant developments which have led to its use as a taggingtool in bioscience (http://nobelprize.org/).

The prize recipients are:

Osamu Shimomura (Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL) WoodsHole, MA, and Boston University Medical School, Boston, MA,USA) who first isolated GFP from the jellyfish Aequorea victoria.

Martin Chalfie (Biological Sciences, Columbia University, NewYork, NY, USA) who demonstrated the value of GFP as a lumi-nous genetic marker.

and

Roger Y. Tsien (Department of Pharmacology and Departmentof Chemistry & Biochemistry, University of California, San Diego,La Jolla, CA, USA) who made fundamental contributions to ourknowledge of the mechanism of GFP fluorescence and devel-oped variants of GFP that emit light at other wavelengths thusfacilitating multiplexing.

The importance and utility of GFP technology is witnessed bythe explosive growth of the GFP literature. A current search ofthe literature indicates more than 24 000 papers in which it hasbeen studied or used as a fluorescent tag. A survey of the GFPliterature can be found in this journal – see Bioluminescence andChemiluminescence Literature: 113 references concerning greenfluorescent protein (GFP) (1975–1996). Journal of Bioluminescenceand Chemiluminescence 1996;11:289–96) and an account of thediscovery of GFP is described by one of the prize winners – seeShimomura, O. The discovery of aequorin and green fluorescentprotein. Journal of Microscopy 2005;2 17:3–15.

LJ Kricka, PE Stanley