Protein from sushi snack may help detect liver diseases

Akiko Kumagai & Atsushi Miyawaki

Researchers have discovered a fluorescent protein in a Japanese eel consumed as a popular sushi snack. Amongst other applications, the discovery could help provide a simpler and more sensitive test to detect jaundice and other diseases.

The idiom “seeing is believing” is what drives many biologists to use fluorescence microscopy, where specifically tagged proteins glow when a laser is shone on them. This glow allows researchers to observe phenomena inside cells at very minute scales (at some billionths of a meter).

The importance of one class of proteins that are used as tags, called green fluorescent proteins (GFPs), was recognised by the 2008 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. But so far, all the GFPs have been derived from non-vertebrate animals—those that lack a spinal cord—such as jellyfish and corals.