Skip to main content

Thank you for visiting nature.com. You are using a browser version with limited support for CSS. To obtain the best experience, we recommend you use a more up to date browser (or turn off compatibility mode in Internet Explorer). In the meantime, to ensure continued support, we are displaying the site without styles and JavaScript.

  • News & Views
  • Published:

FLUORESCENT PROTEINS

A blueprint for glow tag engineering

In two seminal papers published 25 years ago, Phillips and Remington reported the structure of the green fluorescent protein (GFP). These studies provided a blueprint for the rational engineering of GFP, catalysing efforts that produced a large and growing collection of fluorescent proteins and indicators of cellular activity.

This is a preview of subscription content, access via your institution

Access options

Buy this article

Prices may be subject to local taxes which are calculated during checkout

Fig. 1: The discovery, structure, and development of the green fluorescent protein (GFP).

References

  1. Chalfie, M., Tu, Y., Euskirchen, G., Ward, W. W. & Prasher, D. C. Green fluorescent protein as a marker for gene expression. Science 263, 802–805 (1994).

    Article  CAS  Google Scholar 

  2. Yang, F., Moss, L. G. & Phillips, G. N. The molecular structure of green fluorescent protein. Nat Biotechnol. 14, 1246–1251 (1996).

    Article  CAS  Google Scholar 

  3. Ormö, M. et al. Crystal structure of the Aequorea victoria green fluorescent protein. Science 273, 1392–1395 (1996).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  4. McCapra, F., Razavi, Z. & Neary, A. P. The fluorescence of the chromophore of the green fluorescent protein of Aequorea and Renilla. J. Chem. Soc. Chem. Commun. 12, 790 (1988).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  5. Zacharias, D. A., Violin, J. D., Newton, A. C. & Tsien, R. Y. Partitioning of lipid-modified monomeric GFPs into membrane microdomains of live cells. Science 296, 913–916 (2002).

    Article  CAS  Google Scholar 

  6. Lambert, T. J. FPbase: a community-editable fluorescent protein database. Nat. Methods 16, 277–278 (2019).

    Article  CAS  Google Scholar 

  7. Lambert, G. G. et al. Aequorea’s secrets revealed: new fluorescent proteins with unique properties for bioimaging and biosensing. PLoS Biol. 18, e3000936 (2020).

    Article  CAS  Google Scholar 

  8. Rodriguez, E. A. et al. The growing and glowing toolbox of fluorescent and photoactive proteins. Trends Biochem. Sci. 42, 111–129 (2017).

    Article  CAS  Google Scholar 

  9. Remington, S. J. Green fluorescent protein: a perspective. Protein Sci. 20, 1509–1519 (2011).

    Article  CAS  Google Scholar 

  10. Jumper, J. et al. Highly accurate protein structure prediction with AlphaFold. Nature 596, 583–589 (2021).

    Article  CAS  Google Scholar 

Download references

Acknowledgements

We thank T. Lambert (Harvard Medical School) for sharing the yearly cumulative numbers of FPs discovered or engineered and N. Shaner (University of California, San Diego) for feedback on this News & Views.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Corresponding author

Correspondence to François St-Pierre.

Ethics declarations

Competing interests

The authors declare no competing interests.

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this article

Lee, J., St-Pierre, F. A blueprint for glow tag engineering. Nat Rev Chem 6, 7–8 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41570-021-00351-9

Download citation

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41570-021-00351-9

Search

Quick links

Nature Briefing

Sign up for the Nature Briefing newsletter — what matters in science, free to your inbox daily.

Get the most important science stories of the day, free in your inbox. Sign up for Nature Briefing