Shimomura, Osamu

Osamu Shimomura, (born August 27, 1928, Fukuchiyama, Japan—died October 19, 2018, Nagasaki), Japanese-born chemist who was a corecipient, with Martin Chalfie and Roger Y. Tsien, of the 2008 Nobel Prize for Chemistry.

In 1955 Shimomura became a research assistant at Nagoya University, where he earned a Ph.D. in organic chemistry in 1960. That same year, he traveled to the United States on the invitation of Princeton University. It was as a researcher there that he made the discovery that would lead to his Nobel Prize honour. In 1982 he moved his studies to the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, from which he later retired as professor emeritus. He also worked at Boston University Medical School.

Shimomura received one-third of the 2008 Nobel Prize for Chemistry for his identification 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. The visual signal that GFP provides allows scientists 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. Subsequent discoveries by his corecipients opened a vast set of opportunities for the utilization of GFP in studying biological processes at the molecular level.