Douglas Prasher

Douglas Carl Prasher (born August 1951 ) is an American molecular biologist.

life and work

Prasher graduated from Ohio State University with a Ph.D. PhD in biochemistry . Then he was a postdoctoral fellow in the Genetics Department at the University of Georgia . From 1983 to 1987 he was employed at the same university in the biochemistry department before doing research at the Marine Biology Laboratory in Woods Hole . Prasher worked there in the field of genetics. In 1985 he succeeded in cloning aequorin . Then he devoted himself to the task of cloning the green fluorescent protein of the jellyfish Aequorea victoria . When he succeeded in isolating, cloning, and sequencing the DNA , his American Cancer Society funding ran out and he was unable to express the gene in bacteria - a step necessary to show that the sequence was correct . Martin Chalfie and Roger Tsien , with whom Prasher worked and who built on his results, succeeded in doing this . Chalfie and Tsien received the Nobel Prize for Chemistry together with Osamu Shimomura in 2008 and explicitly recognized Prasher's contribution.

Because he could not get a permanent position, he moved to the nearby Otis Plant Protection Center of the Ministry of Agriculture as a population geneticist in 1992 . In 2001 he went to CPHST's Plant Germplasm Quarantine & Biotechnology Laboratory in Beltsville. In 2008 he worked as a taxi driver (shuttle operator) and hoped to find another job as a scientist soon. From 2012 to 2015 he worked as a scientist in Roger Tsien's group.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ D. Prasher, RO McCann and MJ Cormier: Cloning and expression of the cDNA coding for aequorin, a bioluminescent calcium-binding protein. In: Biochemical and Biophysical Research Communications . Volume 126, 1985, pp. 1259-1268.
2. ↑ DC Prasher, VK Eckenrode, WW Ward, FG Prendergast and MJ Cormier: Primary structure of the Aequorea victoria green-fluorescent protein . In: Genes . Volume 111, 1992, pp. 229-233.
3. ^ R. Heim and RY Tsien: Engineering green fluorescent protein for improved brightness, longer wavelengths and fluorescence resonance energy transfer. In: Current Biology. Volume 6, 1996, pp. 178-182.
4. ↑ M. Chalfie, Y. Tu, G. Euskirchen, WW Ward and DC Prasher: Green fluorescent protein as a marker for gene expression . In: Science . Volume 263, 1994, pp. 802-805
5. ↑ Lee Roop: 'Magical' Nobel trip could lead to new opportunities . In: Huntsville Times , December 18, 2008. Archived from the original on June 9, 2011 Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. . Retrieved February 4, 2009.  
6. ↑ The Huntsville Times, October 11, 2008, URL ( Memento of the original from October 11, 2008 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link has been inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. 
7. ↑ Roger Tsien Obituary

Web links

• Douglas C. Prasher on cphst.org ( Memento from September 6, 2003 in the Internet Archive )
• Douglas Prasher on conncoll.edu (English)