MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif., Oct. 14 — Clontech Laboratories, Inc., a wholly-owned subsidiary of Takara Bio Inc., applauds the three winners of the 2008 Nobel Prize in Chemistry; Drs. Osamu Shimomura, Martin Chalfie, and Roger Y. Tsien, for the discovery and development of the green fluorescent protein (GFP) and a wide array of related fluorescent proteins. The application of fluorescent proteins as a research tool has revolutionized life science research and biotechnology: they enable researchers to monitor cellular activity in real time, characterize gene expression, and localize specific proteins, organelles, or cells of interest. Thus, fluorescent proteins have facilitated many groundbreaking discoveries in cell biology over the past decade. “As a long-standing leader in the fluorescent protein field, Clontech is proud to have been the first company to commercialize the GFP technology that was developed by Dr. Chalfie and Dr. Douglas Prasher, enabling GFP to be used as a tool for cell biology research. Currently, we offer many fluorescent proteins that build upon the work of these three exceptional scientists, including the Fruit Fluorescent Proteins developed by Dr. Tsien,” said Carol Lou, General Manager of Clontech Laboratories, Inc. GFP was initially discovered and characterized by Dr. Shimomura, who isolated it from the jellyfish Aequorea victoria and discovered that it glowed bright green under ultraviolet light. Dr. Chalfie applied GFP to biological research, using it as a visual genetic tag to study biological phenomena in the bacterium Escherichia coli and the model organism Caenorhabditis elegans. Dr. Roger Y. Tsien, a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator of the University of California, San Diego, furthered our general understanding of how GFP fluoresces and has engineered many fluorescent proteins, spanning a wide spectrum of colors not found in nature. The use of these different colored variants has enabled scientists to follow several different biological processes at the same time.