Roger Yonchien Tsien (Chinese: 錢永健; February 1, 1952 – August 24, 2016) 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.
Early life
Tsien was born to a Chinese American family in New York in 1952. He grew up in Livingston, New Jersey, and attended Livingston High School. Tsien traces his family ancestry to Hangzhou, China. His father Hsue-Chu Tsien, an MIT and Shanghai Chiao Tung University alumnus, was a mechanical engineer and had excelled academically, graduating at the top of his university class. Tsien suffered from asthma as a child, and as a result, he was often indoors. He spent hours conducting chemistry experiments in his basement laboratory. When he was 16, he won first prize in the nationwide Westinghouse Talent Search with a project investigating how metals bind to thiocyanate.
Education Tsien attended Harvard College on a National Merit Scholarship and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa as a junior. He graduated summa cum laude with a Bachelor of Arts in chemistry and physics in 1972. According to his freshman-year roommate, economist and Iowa politician Herman Quirmbach, "It's probably not an exaggeration to say he's the smartest person I ever met ... [a]nd I have met a lot of brilliant people." After completing his bachelor's degree, Tsien joined the Physiological Laboratory at the University of Cambridge in Cambridge, England with the aid of a Marshall Scholarship, and resided at Churchill College, Cambridge. He received his PhD in physiology in 1977 for research on The Design and Use of Organic Chemical Tools in Cellular Physiology formally supervised by Richard Adrian in the department of physiology and assisted by Andy Holmes, Gerry Smith and Jeremy Sanders in the department of chemistry.
Research and career Following his Ph.D., Tsien was a research fellow at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, from 1977 to 1981. He was appointed to the faculty at the University of California, Berkeley, from 1982 to 1989. Beginning in 1989, he worked at the University of California, San Diego, as professor of pharmacology and professor of chemistry and biochemistry, and as an investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. Tsien contributed to the fields of cell biology and neurobiology by discovering genetically programmable fluorescent tags, thereby allowing scientists to watch the behavior of molecules in living cells in real time. He also developed fluorescent indicators of calcium ions and other ions important in biological processes.
In 2004, Tsien was awarded the Wolf Prize in Medicine "for his seminal contribution to the design and biological application of novel fluorescent and photolabile molecules to analyze and perturb cell signal transduction." In 2008, Tsien shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Osamu Shimomura and Martin Chalfie for "the green fluorescent protein: discovery, expression and development."
Fluorescent proteins The multicolored fluorescent proteins developed in Tsien's lab are used by scientists to track where and when certain genes are expressed in cells or in whole organisms. Typically, the gene coding for a protein of interest is fused with the gene for a fluorescent protein, which causes the protein of interest to glow inside the cell when the cell is irradiated with a suitable wavelength of light and allows microscopists to track its location in real time. This is such a popular technique that it has added a new dimension to the fields of molecular biology, cell biology, and biochemistry. Since the discovery of the wild type GFP, numerous different mutants of GFP have been engineered and tested. The first significant leap forward was a single point mutation (S65T) reported by Tsien in 1995 in Nature. This mutation dramatically improved the fluorescent (both intensity and photostability) and spectral characteristics of GFP. A shift of the major excitation peak to 488 nm with the emission peak staying at 509 nm thus can be clearly observed, which matched very well the spectral characteristics of commonly available FITC facilities. All these then largely amplified the practicality of using GFP by scientists in their research. Tsien mainly contributed to much of our understanding of how GFP works and for developing new techniques and mutants of GFP. Former trainees of Roger Y. Tsien include Atsushi Miyawaki and Alice Y. Ting. Timelines of GFP-development involved by Tsien:
1994: Tsien showed the mechanism that GFP chromophore is formed in a chemical reaction which requires oxygen but without help from the other proteins. 1994–1998: Tsien and collaborators made various GFP mutants by genetic modification and structural tweaking. Newly created variants of GFP can shine more brightly and show different colours, such as yellow, cyan, and blue. 2000–2002: Tsien produced monomeric variants of DsRED, which can glow in shades of red, pink, and orange. Remarkably, since then complicated marcromolecular networks of living organisms can be labelled or marked by using "all the colours of the rainbow". Other detailed highlights involved by Tsien:
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