Fruit flies, mice, zebra fish, yeast and the tiny worm C. elegans are model organisms that have carried modern biology on their backs.
Scientists did not choose them for their charisma. They were chosen because their similarities illuminate biological principles across many species. Their biology is simple enough for researchers to master yet deep enough to keep delivering new insights centuries later.
But biologists don’t have a common reference point for a vast area of the field: proteins, the cell’s doers. Proteins catalyze chemical reactions, give cells their structure and help them communicate with each other. Most organisms use tens of thousands of protein types, and each can be mutated, modified and measured in different ways and in countless environments. Thanks in part to artificial intelligence, researchers are also generating new proteins faster than they can study them.
Without a shared reference point, study results are hard to compare. Two labs can study the same protein under different experimental conditions and end up with findings that do not line up. The result is a scientific literature full of isolated findings that are sometimes duplicated and difficult to generalize.
As a computational chemist who studies fluorescent proteins, I argue that labs also need a set of model proteins. Like how fruit flies and mice anchor whole fields, model proteins can help researchers build on each other’s findings and better understand the fundamentals of biology.
Green fluorescent protein illuminates what’s under study.
Moen et al/BMC Cancer, CC BY-SA
Green fluorescent protein as a model
If model proteins are to be yardsticks, the best place to start is with proteins researchers already reach for when they need a reliable standard. Green fluorescent protein is at the top of that list.
Green fluorescent protein, first isolated from a jellyfish, glows bright green when under a blue light. Biologists fuse green fluorescent protein to other proteins to track where the proteins go and when they are made.
Green fluorescent protein is already a de facto reference point for the field, used as a practice protein in experiments before attempting bigger goals. In the early 2000s, researchers used the protein and a yellow version in cloned pigs to show that foreign genes could be added to large mammals and reliably work. Green fluorescent protein made it obvious that the new gene was successfully incorporated because researchers could literally see that the pigs’ cells were making the protein encoded by the fluorescence genes.
Green fluorescent protein is a Nobel Prize-winning discovery.
The long-term aim of these experiments was to engineer pigs to produce specific human proteins that help the immune system accept a pig organ rather than reject it. Green fluorescent protein helped show that the basic engineering of…
