FACTBOX: Nobel Chemistry Prize -- Who are the winners

(Reuters) - Osamu Shimomura, Martin Chalfie and Roger Y Tsien shared the 2008 Nobel Prize for Chemistry on Wednesday for the discovery and development of the green fluorescent protein GFP.

Here are some details about the winners:

* WHAT IS GFP:

-- The green fluorescent protein, GFP, has functioned in the past decade as a guiding star for biochemists, biologists, medical scientists and other researchers. Its strong green color appears under blue and ultraviolet light.

-- It can, for example, illuminate growing cancer tumors; show the development of Alzheimer's disease in the brain or the growth of pathogenic bacteria.

-- An even more interesting use of GFP means that researchers can follow processes inside individual cells.

-- The body consists of billions of cells, from pumping heart muscle cells and insulin-producing beta cells to macrophages that destroy unwelcome bacteria. The more researchers know about a cell type, how it develops and functions, the greater the chance that they can develop effective drugs with minimal side-effects.

* WHO ARE THE WINNERS?

-- Osamu Shimomura was the first person to isolate GFP and to find out which part of GFP was responsible for its fluorescence. Shimomura was born in Kyoto in 1928 and was a scientist at Princeton when he discovered GFP in 1962. For 20 years starting in 1967, Shimomura made a summer pilgrimage to Friday Harbor in Washington state to gather more than 3,000 jellyfish per day. He is presently professor emeritus at Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL), Woods Hole, and Boston University Medical School in the United States.

-- Martin Chalfie was born in the United States in 1947 and gained his Ph.D. in neurobiology in 1977 from Harvard University. He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2004. Chalfie has demonstrated the value of GFP as a luminous genetic tag for various biological phenomena. He is presently the William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of Biological Sciences at Columbia University, New York.

-- Roger Y. Tsien was born in New York in 1952 and gained his PH.D. in physiology in 1977 at Cambridge University in Britain. He has contributed to our general understanding of how GFP fluoresces. He also extended the color palette beyond green allowing researchers to give various proteins and cells different colors. Today with his discovery, scientists are able to study biological processes that were previously invisible. Tsien has been a professor at University of California, San Diego, since 1989.

Sources: Reuters/www.nobel.org/