Roger Y. Tsien
Roger Yonchien Tsien ( born February 1, 1952 in New York City ) is a Sino- American cell biologist and together with Osamu Shimomura and Martin Chalfie, winner of the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 2008.
Life and work
Roger Tsien was the son of the engineer Hsue -Chu Tsien and nurse Yi - Ying Tsien, born Li, who was born and grew up in Livingston, New Jersey. His eldest brother Richard Winyu Tsien is a neurobiologist at Stanford University. The aeronautical engineer Tsien Hsue -shen is the cousin of his father.
Already as a student led Tsien at home chemical experiments. In 1968 he won first prize in the Westinghouse Science Talent Search for studies on the binding of metals to thiocyanates. He studied chemistry and physics at Harvard University, where in 1972 he received his bachelors degree. Then he went to the physiologist Richard Adrian to the Churchill College, University of Cambridge, where he received his doctorate in 1977. Subsequently, he was post-doctoral fellow at Gonville and Caius College. In 1981, he joined as an assistant professor at the Department of Physiology and Anatomy, University of California, Berkeley. 1985-1987 he was adjunct professor there from 1987 to 1989 and full professor. Since 1989 he has been professor of pharmacology, chemistry and biochemistry at the University of California, San Diego and researcher at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. Guest professorships led him in 1991 to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and 2003 at the University of Cambridge.
Tsien worked in the field of imaging cell biology. So he created fluorescent dyes to make the cellular calcium visible. He developed substances that can penetrate through the cell membrane, so that the movement of calcium was also examined in living cells. Later he improved the properties of the dye and used similar methods to detect sodium and cyclic adenosine monophosphate. In order to study the interaction of two molecules labeled with fluorescent dyes, he used the fluorescence resonance energy transfer. Perhaps his most famous contribution was the provision of different variants of the green fluorescent protein ( GFP) and its use. Later he changed his research focus on the picture and treatment of cancer tumors. He developed a U-shaped peptide - is specifically taken up by the cancer cell - equipped with an imaging molecule or a drug.
On July 30, 1982, he married Wendy M. Globe.
Publications
Tsien has published more than 100 articles and more than 60 patents.
- The design and use of organic chemical tools in cellular physiology. PhD thesis, Cambridge 1976