My history with GFP (and other members of the family)

Posted by Joachim Goedhart, on 7 July 2020

I first crossed paths with green fluorescent protein (GFP) while doing an internship in 1996 at the Max Planck Institute in Göttingen. I was chemically labeling epidermal growth factor (EGF) with the fluorescent dyes Cy3 and Cy5 to study growth-factor signaling. Two post-docs were discussing the use of GFP as an alternative fluorescent tag and