Martin Chalfie | |
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![]() Chalfie at the Royal Society admissions day in London, July 2018 | |
Born | Martin Lee Chalfie [1] January 15, 1947 Chicago, Illinois, U.S. |
Citizenship | American |
Education | Harvard University (AB, PhD) |
Known for | Green fluorescent protein |
Spouse | Tulle Hazelrigg [2] |
Awards | E. B. Wilson Medal (2008) Nobel Prize in Chemistry (2008) Golden Goose Award (2012) Foreign Member of the Royal Society (2018) Lomonosov Gold Medal (2018) |
Scientific career | |
Fields | Neurobiology |
Institutions | Columbia University Laboratory of Molecular Biology University of Cambridge |
Thesis | Regulation of catecholamine biosynthesis and secretion in a rat pheochromocytoma (1977) |
Doctoral advisor | Robert L. Perlman |
Website | biology |
Martin Lee Chalfie (born January 15, 1947) is an American scientist. He is University Professor at Columbia University. [3] He shared the 2008 Nobel Prize in Chemistry along with Osamu Shimomura and Roger Y. Tsien "for the discovery and development of the green fluorescent protein, GFP". [4] He holds a PhD in neurobiology from Harvard University.
Chalfie grew up in Chicago, Illinois, son of the guitarist Eli Chalfie (1910–1996) and owner of an apparel store Vivian Chalfie (née Friedlen, 1913–2005). His maternal grandfather, Meyer L. Friedlen, immigrated to Chicago from Moscow at an early age; his paternal grandparents, Benjamin and Esther Chalfie, came to Cincinnati from Brest-Litovsk [5] and are Jewish. [6]
He matriculated at Harvard University in 1965, intending to be a math major, [7] but he switched to biochemistry because it combined his interests in chemistry, math, and biology. [7] He spent the summer after his junior year working in the laboratory of Klaus Weber at Harvard, but "It was so disheartening to completely fail that I decided I shouldn't be in biology." [8] As a result, in his senior year, he completed his major and took courses in law, theater, and Russian literature. [7]
He also competed on the swim team at Harvard and was named captain in his senior year. At the time, swimming coach Bill Brooks said, "Marty will make an excellent captain because he has the admiration of the entire team." [9] As captain, he won the Harold S. Ulen trophy, awarded "to a senior on the Harvard team who best demonstrates those qualities of leadership, sportsmanship, and team cooperation as exemplified by Harold S. Ulen." [10] Following the announcement of Chalfie's Nobel award, his freshman-year roommate observed of Chalfie, "He would always identify himself as a swimmer." [8]
After graduating in 1969, he worked at a variety of temporary jobs, such as selling dresses for his parents' dress manufacturing business in Chicago [7] and teaching at Hamden Hall Country Day School in Hamden, Connecticut. [7] In the summer of 1971, his research at the laboratory of Jose Zadunaisky at Yale University resulted in his first publication. With revived confidence, [7] he returned to Harvard for graduate studies under Robert Perlman, and received his PhD in 1977.
Chalfie conducted his postdoctoral research at the Laboratory of Molecular Biology (LMB) with Sydney Brenner and John Sulston, and the three published a paper in 1985 on "The Neural Circuit for Touch Sensitivity in C. elegans ". [11] Chalfie then left the LMB in 1982 to join the faculty of Columbia University in the department of biological sciences and continued to study C. elegans touch mutants.
He married Tulle Hazelrigg. She later joined him on the faculty of Columbia University. [7] She gave him permission to cite her unpublished research in his seminal Science paper "Green Fluorescent Protein as a Marker for Gene Expression" [12] on condition that he made coffee, cooked, and emptied the garbage nightly for a month. [13]
Chalfie and his wife had a daughter, Sarah, in July 1992.
Chalfie was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2004.
He slept through the phone call from the Nobel Prize Committee. [8] [14] When he woke up, he knew the prize would have been announced already, so he said "Okay, who's the schnook that got the Prize this time?" And so he opened up his laptop, got to the Nobel Prize site and found out that he was the schnook! [14]
In 2015, Chalfie signed the Mainau Declaration 2015 on Climate Change on the final day of the 65th Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting. The declaration was signed by a total of 76 Nobel Laureates and handed to then-President of the French Republic, François Hollande, as part of the successful COP21 climate summit in Paris. [15]
Chalfie's lab uses the nematode C. elegans to investigate aspects of nerve cell development and function. The wealth of developmental, anatomical, genetic, and molecular information available for C. elegans provides a powerful and multifaceted approach to these studies.
He has published over 100 papers of which at least 25 have over 100 citations. [16]
He traces his work on green fluorescent protein to a 1988 seminar from Paul Brehm about bioluminescent organisms, which led to some crucial experiments in 1992, detailed in his paper "Green fluorescent protein as a marker for gene expression", [17] which is among the 20 most-cited papers in the field of Molecular Biology & Genetics. [18] Chalfie won a Golden Goose Award for this work in 2012. [19]
He received an honorary degree in physics from the University of Parma on 4 July 2023. [20]
Walter Gilbert is an American biochemist, physicist, molecular biology pioneer, and Nobel laureate.
The green fluorescent protein (GFP) is a protein that exhibits bright green fluorescence when exposed to light in the blue to ultraviolet range. The label GFP traditionally refers to the protein first isolated from the jellyfish Aequorea victoria and is sometimes called avGFP. However, GFPs have been found in other organisms including corals, sea anemones, zoanithids, copepods and lancelets.
In molecular biology and biotechnology, a fluorescent tag, also known as a fluorescent label or fluorescent probe, is a molecule that is attached chemically to aid in the detection of a biomolecule such as a protein, antibody, or amino acid. Generally, fluorescent tagging, or labeling, uses a reactive derivative of a fluorescent molecule known as a fluorophore. The fluorophore selectively binds to a specific region or functional group on the target molecule and can be attached chemically or biologically. Various labeling techniques such as enzymatic labeling, protein labeling, and genetic labeling are widely utilized. Ethidium bromide, fluorescein and green fluorescent protein are common tags. The most commonly labelled molecules are antibodies, proteins, amino acids and peptides which are then used as specific probes for detection of a particular target.
Howard Robert Horvitz ForMemRS NAS AAA&S APS NAM is an American biologist best known for his research on the nematode worm Caenorhabditis elegans, for which he was awarded the 2002 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, together with Sydney Brenner and John E. Sulston, whose "seminal discoveries concerning the genetic regulation of organ development and programmed cell death" were "important for medical research and have shed new light on the pathogenesis of many diseases".
Christian Boehmer Anfinsen Jr. was an American biochemist. He shared the 1972 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Stanford Moore and William Howard Stein for work on ribonuclease, especially concerning the connection between the amino acid sequence and the biologically active conformation.
Aequorea victoria, also sometimes called the crystal jelly, is a bioluminescent hydrozoan jellyfish, or hydromedusa, that is found off the west coast of North America.
Avram Hershko is a Hungarian-Israeli biochemist who received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2004.
Aaron Ciechanover is an Israeli biologist who won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for characterizing the method that cells use to degrade and recycle proteins using ubiquitin.
The pGLO plasmid is an engineered plasmid used in biotechnology as a vector for creating genetically modified organisms. The plasmid contains several reporter genes, most notably the green fluorescent protein (GFP) and the ampicillin resistance gene. GFP was isolated from the jelly fish Aequorea victoria. Because it shares a bidirectional promoter with a gene for metabolizing arabinose, the GFP gene is expressed in the presence of arabinose, which makes the transgenic organism express its fluorescence under UV light. GFP can be induced in bacteria containing the pGLO plasmid by growing them on +arabinose plates. pGLO is made by Bio-Rad Laboratories.
In biology, a marker gene may have several meanings. In nuclear biology and molecular biology, a marker gene is a gene used to determine if a nucleic acid sequence has been successfully inserted into an organism's DNA. In particular, there are two sub-types of these marker genes: a selectable marker and a marker for screening. In metagenomics and phylogenetics, a marker gene is an orthologous gene group which can be used to delineate between taxonomic lineages.
Roger David Kornberg is an American biochemist and professor of structural biology at Stanford University School of Medicine. Kornberg was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2006 for his studies of the process by which genetic information from DNA is copied to RNA, "the molecular basis of eukaryotic transcription."
Roger Yonchien Tsien was an American biochemist. He was a professor of chemistry and biochemistry at the University of California, San Diego and was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2008 for his discovery and development of the green fluorescent protein, in collaboration with organic chemist Osamu Shimomura and neurobiologist Martin Chalfie. Tsien was also a pioneer of calcium imaging.
Osamu Shimomura was a Japanese organic chemist and marine biologist, and professor emeritus at Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL) in Woods Hole, Massachusetts and Boston University School of Medicine. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2008 for the discovery and development of green fluorescent protein (GFP) with two American scientists: Martin Chalfie of Columbia University and Roger Tsien of the University of California-San Diego.
Douglas C. Prasher is an American molecular biologist. He is known for his work to clone and sequence the genes for the photoprotein aequorin and green fluorescent protein (GFP) and for his proposal to use GFP as a tracer molecule. He communicated his pioneering work to Martin Chalfie and Roger Y. Tsien, but by 1991 he was unable to obtain further research funding, and left academia. Eventually, he had to abandon science. Chalfie and Tsien were awarded the 2008 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for work that they publicly acknowledged was substantially based on Prasher's work; through their efforts and those of others, he returned to scientific research in June 2010.
Paul Brehm is a researcher at the Vollum Institute at Oregon Health and Science University. It was during a seminar by Brehm that Martin Chalfie became inspired to work on Green fluorescent protein for which Chalfie shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2008.
Fluorescence is used in the life sciences generally as a non-destructive way of tracking or analysing biological molecules. Some proteins or small molecules in cells are naturally fluorescent, which is called intrinsic fluorescence or autofluorescence. Alternatively, specific or general proteins, nucleic acids, lipids or small molecules can be "labelled" with an extrinsic fluorophore, a fluorescent dye which can be a small molecule, protein or quantum dot. Several techniques exist to exploit additional properties of fluorophores, such as fluorescence resonance energy transfer, where the energy is passed non-radiatively to a particular neighbouring dye, allowing proximity or protein activation to be detected; another is the change in properties, such as intensity, of certain dyes depending on their environment allowing their use in structural studies.
John Woodland "Woody" Hastings, was a leader in the field of photobiology, especially bioluminescence, and was one of the founders of the field of circadian biology. He was the Paul C. Mangelsdorf Professor of Natural Sciences and Professor of Molecular and Cellular Biology at Harvard University. He published over 400 papers and co-edited three books.
George Pearson Smith is an American biologist and Nobel laureate. He is a Curators' Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Biological Sciences at the University of Missouri in Columbia, Missouri, US.
Tulle Inger Hazelrigg is an American biologist who is Professor of Cell Biology at Columbia University. Her research considers the propagation and differentiation of germ cells. Hazelrigg was the first to attach green fluorescent protein to other proteins, which changed the way biological research could be conducted.