Nobel Prize winners for Chemistry announced

Osamu Shimomura, Martin Chalfie and Roger Y. Tsien have been awarded the 2008 Nobel Prize for Chemistry for the discovery and development of the green fluorescent protein, GFP.

The trio will receive their awards at the annual ceremony in Stockholm on 10 December, the anniversary of Alfred Noble’s death.

Glowing proteins – a guiding star for biochemistry

GFP was first observed in the jellyfish, Aequorea victoria in 1962. Since then, this protein has become one of the most important tools used in contemporary bioscience, enabling researchers to develop ways of watching previously invisible processes such as the development of nerve cells in the brain or how cancer cells spread.

This year's Nobel Prize in Chemistry rewards the initial discovery of GFP and a series of important developments which have led to its use as a tagging tool in bioscience.

• Osamu Shimomura (Marine Biological Laboratory and Boston University Medical School) first isolated GFP from Aequorea victoria and discovered that the protein glowed bright green under ultraviolet light.
• Martin Chalfie (Columbia University) demonstrated the value of GFP as a luminous genetic tag for various biological phenomena.  
• Roger Y. Tsien (Howard Hughes Medical Institute, University of California) contributed to our general understanding of how GFP fluoresces and enabled scientists to follow several different biological processes at the same time.

Not forgetting physics…

The 2009 Nobel Prize for Physics has been jointly awarded to Yoichiro Nambu (Enrico Fermi Institute, University of Chicago) and the team of Makoto Kobayashi (High Energy Accelerator Research Organization, Tsukuba, Japan) and Toshihide Maskawa, (Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics, Kyoto University).

Nambu was recognised for the discovery of the mechanism of spontaneous broken symmetry in subatomic physics.  Kobayashi and Maskawa were rewarded for their work in discovering of the origin of the broken symmetry which predicts the existence of at least three families of quarks in nature.