Photo credit: Santiagoagentino — Wikimedia Commons · CC BY-SA 3.0
Roger Y. Tsien
1952–2016 · United States · Contemporary
Nobel Chemistry 2008
UC San Diego chemist who turned GFP into a rainbow of fluorescent probes for living cells; he also designed calcium indicators and shared the 2008 Nobel Prize.
Nobel Prize work
Shared with Osamu Shimomura and Martin Chalfie for the green fluorescent protein: Tsien explained how the GFP chromophore forms chemically, then engineered a whole palette of brighter, differently coloured variants and FRET pairs, making GFP a universal tool for imaging processes inside living cells.
Fields
Related topics
Fluorescence, NMR spectroscopy
Fluorescence reports excited-state emission; NMR reports nuclei in distinct magnetic and chemical environments.
PROTACs, targeted protein degradation
PROTACs are heterobifunctional molecules that redirect cellular protein-quality-control machinery to degrade a selected target.