Folding of green fluoresent protein (GFP)

Discovery of Green Fluorescent Protein, Gfp

I discovered the green fluorescent protein GFP from the jellyfish Aequorea aequorea in 1961 as a byproduct of the Ca-sensitive photoprotein aequorin (Shimomura et al., 1962; Johnson et al., 1962), and identified its chromophore in 1979 (Shimomura, 1979). GFP was a beautiful protein but it remained useless for the next 30 years after the discovery. My story begins in 1945, the year the city of N...

Endogenous green fluorescent protein (GFP) in amphioxus.

Cotranslational folding increases GFP folding yield.

Protein sequences evolved to fold in cells, including cotranslational folding of nascent polypeptide chains during their synthesis by the ribosome. The vectorial (N- to C-terminal) nature of cotranslational folding constrains the conformations of the nascent polypeptide chain in a manner not experienced by full-length chains diluted out of denaturant. We are still discovering to what extent the...

Denaturant-dependent folding of GFP.

We use molecular simulations using a coarse-grained model to map the folding landscape of Green Fluorescent Protein (GFP), which is extensively used as a marker in cell biology and biotechnology. Thermal and Guanidinium chloride (GdmCl) induced unfolding of a variant of GFP, without the chromophore, occurs in an apparent two-state manner. The calculated midpoint of the equilibrium folding in Gd...

Discovery of green fluorescent protein (GFP) (Nobel Lecture).