UW News

March 2, 2006

Of jellyfish and ‘jumping green genes’

The green fluorescent protein that some jellyfish have developed to light themselves up has proven useful for scientists, too.

At Montana State University’s Department of Cell Biology and Neuroscience, Dr. Thomas Hughes has been using green fluorescent protein to study structure and function in the brain, and particularly in the retina of the eye.

He and his colleagues are now concentrating on developing new biosensors, based on green fluorescent protein (GFP), that can be used for other neuroscience research.

He has been able to attach the genes for GFP, which he sometimes calls “jumping green genes,” to specific proteins, so that images can be taken of their movement in the nervous system. He has developed several related tools and techniques, all aimed at his central goal of defining the synaptic circuitry, or the links between neurons, in the visual system, and he continues to explore how the fluorescent protein can be used.

Hughes will speak at the UW on his work for the annual

WWAMI Science in Medicine Lecture at noon on Thursday, March 16, in Hogness Auditorium at the Health Sciences Center. His topic is Using the Jellyfish Green Fluorescent Protein to Study the Brain.

The lecture will be simulcast to the auditorium at Harborview’s Research and Training Building and the Seattle VA medical center, Building 1, room 518. Each year, the Science in Medicine series includes one lecture by a faculty member at one of the universities where first-year medical students take classes in the WWAMI (Washington, Wyoming, Alaska, Montana and Idaho) program.

Hughes, who is an associate professor in the Department of Cell Biology and Neuroscience at Montana State in Bozeman, earned a bachelor’s degree in biology from Tufts University and then a Ph.D. in anatomy in 1986 from Duke University. From 1986 to 1989, he was a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Neurosciences at the University of California, San Diego, and then an assistant research scientist there.

He went to Yale University Medical School in 1993 as an assistant professor and then associate professor in ophthalmology and visual science, and in neurobiology.

In 2003, he moved to Montana State.