Green Fluorescent Protein

For the first time created laser light using living biological
material:
Seok-Hyun Yun, an optical physicist at Harvard
Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital in
Boston, created the 'living laser with his colleague
Malte Gather.
a single human cell and
some jellyfish protein.
The green fluorescent
protein (GFP) is
a protein composed of 238 amino
acid residues (26.9kDa) that exhibits
bright green fluorescence when
exposed to ultraviolet blue light. Although
many other marine organisms have similar
green fluorescent proteins, GFP
traditionally refers to the protein first
isolated from the jellyfish Aequorea
victoria.
a lasing material that amplifies light from
an external source (a 'gain medium') and
an arrangement of mirrors (an 'optical
cavity'), which concentrates and aligns
the light waves into a tight beam.
Building a laser requires two things:
Until now, the gain medium has only been
made from non-biological substances such as
doped crystals, semiconductors or gases.
But in this recent study, the researchers
used enhanced green
fluorescent protein (GFP)
the substance that makes jellyfish
bioluminescent, which is used extensively in
cell biology to label cells.
The team engineered human embryonic kidney
cells to produce GFP, then placed a single cell
between two mirrors to make an optical cavity just 20
micrometers across.
When they fed the cell pulses of blue light, it
emitted a directional laser beam visible with the
naked eye and the cell wasn't harmed.
The width of the laser beam is
"tiny" and "fairly weak"
in its brightness compared to
traditional lasers, says Yun, but "an
order of magnitude" brighter
than natural jellyfish
fluorescence, with a
"beautiful green" colour.
APPLICATIONS
Yun and Gather suggest that biologists
could turn cells of interest into lasers to
study them. The light produced has a
unique emission spectrum related to both
the structure of the cell and the proteins
inside it. "By analyzing the
pattern you can get
some idea of what is
happening inside the
cell," says Yun.
The researchers also suggest possible
medical applications. Doctors today
shine lasers into the body to gather
images or to treat disease by attacking
cells. Yun thinks that
lasers could instead be
generated or amplified
inside the body, where they
could penetrate the relevant tissues
more deeply.
But more work is needed first including
developing the laser so that it works inside an
actual living organism. To achieve this, Yun
envisages integrating a
nano-scale optical cavity
into the laser cell itself.
Technologies to make such cavities are
emerging, he says, and once they are
available they could be used to create a cell
that could "self lase" from inside tissue.
Michael Berns, a biomedical
engineer at the University of
California, says that the
technique might
more feasibly be
used to study
individual cells
than for medical
applications.
He points out that
external light is needed
to stimulate the laser
action, which would be
difficult in the body,
potentially limiting the
technique to thin-tissue
systems or cells in
culture or suspension.
It has also been found that new lines of transgenic
GFP rats can be relevant for gene therapy as well as
regenerative medicine. By using "high-expresser"
GFP, transgenic rats display high expression in most
tissues, and many cells that have not been
characterized or have been only poorly characterized
in previous GFP-transgenic rats.