April 8, 2004
Using fluorescent protein to see inside living cells
Within every living cell, whether it’s a single-cell life form or part of a large animal, there’s a world of activity in process. Parts of the cell, called organelles, are being formed. Proteins are moving around. Membranes are strengthened or weakened.
Dr. Jennifer Lippincott-Schwartz, who will give the next Science in Medicine Lecture, is a leading cell scientist and head of the Section on Organelle Biology, part of the Cell Biology and Metabolism Branch at the National Institute of Child Health and Development.
She is best known for pioneering the use of green fluorescent protein (GFP) technology to study protein traffic within cells and the formation of organelles, defined as discrete structures with specialized functions.
The green fluorescent protein she uses is cloned from a jellyfish, and there is also a red fluorescent protein cloned from a sea anemone. Lippincott-Schwartz’s lab uses a variety of GFP-based fluorescent imaging techniques, including dual-color time-lapse imaging, photobleaching and photoactivation. All of these methods can be used with living cells.
She earned her bachelor’s degree from Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania and then went to Stanford to earn a master’s degree in biology. Her Ph.D. in biochemistry is from Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.
She was a postdoctoral fellow in the laboratory of Dr. Richard Klausner, now with the Gates Foundation in Seattle, when he was at the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development and then she became chief of the Section on Organelle Biology in 1992.
In 2003 Lippincott-Schwartz received an Award of Merit from the National Institutes of Health “for fundamental contributions to the understanding of how intracellular organelles are assembled and how proteins move within cells.”
She has been a member of the council of the American Society for Cell Biology and is an associate editor for two leading journals in the field: the Journal of Cell Science and Current Protocols in Cell Biology. She is also a member of the editorial boards for several other journals. She leads the Cell Biology Interest Group at NIH.
Lippincott-Schwartz will speak on “Insights into Cell Compartmentalization and Protein Transport using GFP Technology” at noon on Thursday, April 15, in Hogness Auditorium at the Health Sciences Center. The lecture is free and open to everyone. Each year, the annual lecture in the Science in Medicine series brings a noted researcher from another institution to campus.
