Chalfie, Martin

Martin Chalfie, (born January 15, 1947, Chicago, Illinois, U.S.), American chemist who was a corecipient, with Osamu Shimomura and Roger Y. Tsien, of the 2008 Nobel Prize for Chemistry.

Chalfie received a Ph.D. in neurobiology from Harvard University in 1977. In 1982 he became a professor of biological sciences at Columbia University in New York, where he did the research that led to his Nobel honour. He became a member of the National Academy of Sciences in 2004. Chalfie and his corecipients were awarded a Nobel Prize in 2008 for their work in the discovery and development of the green fluorescent protein (GFP), a naturally occurring substance in the jellyfish Aequorea victoria that is used as a tool to make visible the actions of certain cells. Their work with GFP opened a vast set of opportunities for studying biological processes at the molecular level.

GFP provides a visual signal that scientists use to probe protein activity, such as when and where proteins are produced and how different proteins or parts of proteins move and approach each other within a cell. In the 1960s Shimomura showed that Aequorea victoria’s green fluorescence, which had been discovered in 1955, is produced by the protein that was later named GFP. American biochemist Douglas Prasher analyzed the chromophore in GFP in the 1980s and subsequently found and cloned the gene responsible for making GFP. In 1993 Chalfie showed that the gene that instructs the cell to make GFP could be embedded in the nucleic acids of other organisms, first in the bacterium Escherichia coli and then in the transparent nematode Caenorhabditis elegans, so that they would make their own GFP. This discovery opened the possibility of using GFP in virtually any organism. Tsien then showed, beginning in 1994, that oxygen is required for GFP fluorescence and that point mutations in the gene could shift the wavelength and intensity of the fluorescence. Tsien also helped to determine the structure of GFP and described how to use GFP and its variants to study the role and behaviour of calcium ions in living systems. Chalfie was given one-third of the 2008 Nobel Prize for Chemistry for being the first to illuminate cells by inserting GFP into them.