[
Chem Soc Rev,
2009]
On December 10, 2008 Osamu Shimomura, Martin Chalfie and Roger Tsien were awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for "the discovery and development of the green fluorescent protein, GFP". The path taken by this jellyfish protein to become one of the most useful tools in modern science and medicine is described. Osamu Shimomura painstakingly isolated GFP from hundreds of thousands of jellyfish, characterized the chromophore and elucidated the mechanism of Aequorean bioluminescence. Martin Chalfie expressed the protein in E. coli and C. elegans, and Roger Tsien developed a palette of fluorescent proteins that could be used in a myriad of applications.
Butler V, Iannello G, Tsien RW, Hawrylycz M, Long F, Ascoli GA, Zhou J, Zhou Z, Zeng H, Xiao H, Gonzalez-Bellido PT, Mitra A, Chen J, Oh SW, Tang J, Myers E, Peng H, Bria A
[
Nat Commun,
2014]
Three-dimensional (3D) bioimaging, visualization and data analysis are in strong need of powerful 3D exploration techniques. We develop virtual finger (VF) to generate 3D curves, points and regions-of-interest in the 3D space of a volumetric image with a single finger operation, such as a computer mouse stroke, or click or zoom from the 2D-projection plane of an image as visualized with a computer. VF provides efficient methods for acquisition, visualization and analysis of 3D images for roundworm, fruitfly, dragonfly, mouse, rat and human. Specifically, VF enables instant 3D optical zoom-in imaging, 3D free-form optical microsurgery, and 3D visualization and annotation of terabytes of whole-brain image volumes. VF also leads to orders of magnitude better efficiency of automated 3D reconstruction of neurons and similar biostructures over our previous systems. We use VF to generate from images of 1,107 Drosophila GAL4 lines a projectome of a Drosophila brain.