First fluorescent protein identified in a vertebrate
Monya Baker
13 June 2013
The Japanese freshwater eel (Anguilla japonica) has more to offer biologists than a tasty sushi snack. Its muscle fibres produce the first fluorescent protein identified in a vertebrate, researchers report in Cell1.
Fluorescent proteins are as standard a tool for cell biologists as wrenches are for mechanics. They do not produce light themselves, but glow when illuminated. The 2008 Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded for the discovery and development of such molecules, which are used to tag proteins or to track how genes are expressed. The molecules have been engineered to produce light in a variety of hues and brightnesses, but those discovered until now in nature all came from non-vertebrates, mainly microbes, jellyfish, and corals.
The first clues to the eel protein’s existence came in 2009 when Seiichi Hayashi and Yoshifumi Toda, food chemists studying nutrients in eel at Kagoshima University in Japan, were tracking lipid transport into oily eel tissue and reported that eel muscle fluoresced naturally2 glowing green when a blue light is shone on it. They then isolated a few fragments of the protein responsible. This intrigued Atsushi Miyawaki, a molecular biologist at the RIKEN Brain Science Institute in Wako, Japan, who has identified and engineered new properties into fluorescent proteins from jellyfish and corals.
In the latest work, Miyawaki and his colleagues have identified the gene that codes for the molecule, and have named the new protein UnaG, after unagi, the Japanese word for freshwater eel that is familiar to sushi lovers worldwide.
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http://www.nature.com/news/first-fluorescent-protein-identified-in-a-vertebrate-1.13190
