Generally, the GFP seen in the lab is not the same stuff found in jellyfish.
They also inserted a gene that produces a fluorescent protein called GFP, Nature Methods journal reports.
"It's like someone's feet in Jersey gangster movies where you're given concrete overshoes, " says GFP researcher Roger Tsien.
But this is not true for GFP--it doesn't need any help at all.
But first, the gene that creates the GFP protein needed to be found.
Thus, when the protein of interest was made, GFP would be made, too.
Many doubted the GFP gene would produce the glowing protein on its own.
Seven years after GFP was first identified, a team of Harvard researchers "discovered" it, never having heard of it before.
Roger Tsien, a professor at University of California in San Diego, mutated and otherwise altered the GFP gene to produce various colors.
Ward, a professor at Rutgers University, had spent a decade becoming one of the world's experts on GFP and the Aequoria jellyfish.
Creating transgenic animals that contain the GFP gene has become increasingly important.
Then Tulle Hazelrigg, a professor at Columbia, modified genes in fruit flies so that the proteins they make have GFP glued to them.
But GFP is a concrete wall of a molecule--it curves around itself such that there is no place for an enzyme to bind.
GFP, as it is known to its friends, gives the glow to Aequorea victoria, a jellyfish that lives in the eastern Pacific Ocean.
Dr Tsien's contribution was to tinker with the GFP gene, and the genes of related proteins found in corals, to produce other colours.
The team from the US and Japan then transferred this gene, along with the one for GFP, into feline eggs - known as oocytes.
The GFP found in the Aequoria jellyfish produces some of its light when hit by ultraviolet light, some when hit by various shades of blue.
Scientists found they could attach the GFP gene to other genes.
In mice, for instance, GFP has enabled adult stem-cell research.
Researchers have used GFP to create, literally, a living laser.
Hazelrigg made her own large contribution to GFP research: She was among the first to attach GFP to other proteins, allowing scientists to watch where individual proteins go within a cell.
Shimomura first noticed green fluorescent protein (GFP) in 1962.
In the early 1990s, a Columbia professor named Martin Chalfie heard that another researcher, Douglas Prasher, was trying to locate the gene for a green fluorescent protein (GFP) found in jellyfish.
Dr Chalfie realised that if the GFP gene could be spliced into a chromosome next to the gene for a protein of interest, it would be controlled by the same genetic switch as that protein.
One of the first stories I was ever really proud of was on the history of green fluorescent protein, or GFP, a glowing protein found in jellyfish that can be used to make living things glow.
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