Shimomura, Osamu

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Osamu Shimomura, 1928–, Japanese organic chemist and marine biologist, Ph.D. Nagoya Univ., 1960. Shimomura was a researcher at Princeton from 1960–82. Since then, he has been a professor at the Marine Biological Laboratory, Woods Hole, Mass., and at Boston Univ. Medical School. He shared the 2008 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Martin Chalfie and Roger Tsien for their discovery and development of the green fluorescent protein (GFP). Shimomura is credited with being the first to isolate GFP (from the jellyfish Aequorea victoria) and to discover that the protein glows bright green under ultraviolet light. GFP's use as a biological marker for particular characteristics has made it one of the most important tools in contemporary bioscience.