Last year’s Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded to Shimomura, Chalfie and Tsien in recognition of their contribution to the discovery, cloning and engineering of the green fluorescent protein (GFP). For anyone that missed this event, have a look at the report that Miyawaki wrote for Cell (2008, vol. 135(6), pp. 987-890), he summarizes the contributions of each of the Nobel Prize winners.
The advent of GFP and its variants has opened up a new era in almost all fields of biology, most notably cell and developmental biology, and has also boosted the development of a variety of fluorescence-based techniques. Overall it has provided the modern biologist with unprecedented potential to visualize with a minimally invasive way all kinds of processes in living cells or tissues and measure their dynamics.
There have been literally hundreds of reports on different GFP variants and their characteristics. However, a large majority of scientists cannot follow closely this “revolution”, as new variants keep emerging, and the properties of older ones are further optimized. As a result of this, it has become a struggle for many labs to keep an eye on new, better, brighter, more stable variants and, more often than not, scientists have trouble deciding on whether they should quit their favorite molecule and switch to another one, mostly because they are overwhelmed by the available choices out there. They also cannot decide which variant to use and overall they stick to the “traditional” (most used) ones, which is not necessarily the best solution to their question.
Besides the trouble choosing the best variant for one’s applications, many scientists still are not aware of the possible artifacts related to the use of fluorescent proteins, and there are unfortunately many reports where the potential of these probes is masked by poor interpretation of the observations, the latter due to incomplete knowledge of the GFP technology under use.
I would be more than happy to discuss with you any thoughts, issues, troubleshooting, general or more technical questions you might have related to GFP variants and their uses, or the use of associated techniques and protocols. I am also curious about your thoughts on whether you think people might have focused so much on GFP technology that other traditional, very robust techniques are not being used that extensively any more, although they could potentially complement GFP-based approaches.
If you have never heard of GFP and you are just wondering about all the hype, I am more than happy to take you through the potential of this molecule, just let me know!