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LANL GFP Technology

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The inventors of LANL's GFP

 

Dr. Geoffrey S. Waldo

Dr. Waldo is a prolific scientist holding nearly ten patents and having over authored or contributed to over 30 publications.Dr. Waldo He graduated summa cum laude from Wright State University and went on to complete his graduate work in chemistry at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He was an NIH postdoctoral fellow at the University of North Carolina where he continued to apply his chemistry background to understanding the structure and funtion of enzymes. He joined Los Alamos National Lab in 1994 as a highly honored Director's Fellow and has been a productive staff member since then.

Dr. Waldo is known as 'The GFP Guy'. He has an encylopedic knowledge of GFP since the first Aequorea strain was discovered in the 1970's. If asked, he can tell you every mutation that makes various GFPs different, who owns the intellectual property and what company has commercialized it. At Los Alamos, his GFP contributions have made a significant impact on the lab's ability to perform structural genomics in a high throughput manner. These contributions are now being used throughout the world to study not only the structures of proteins, but everthing from the behaviour of thermophiles to how neurons interact.

Dr. Waldo is an accomplished musician and enjoyes playing classical and jazz piano. He has even conquered the crushingly difficult 'Rach 3', as made famous by the movie Shine. When Dr. Waldo is not in the laboratory or at the piano, he can be found in the Santa Fe area's best sushi restaurants.

Dr. Stephanie Cabantous

A native of France, Stéphanie Cabantous received her undergraduate degree from the University of Toulouse in 2001 while working at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) on the biochemical characterization of enzymatic targets. In 2002, she started a PhD thesis in the group of Geoffrey S. Waldo, at the Los Alamos Dr. CabantousNational Laboratory where she collaborated on the development of the split-GFP assay as part of her PhD thesis research. She also worked intensively on the development of the GFP folding reporters based on circular permutant GFP insertions.

She applied the split-GFP technology to trap soluble domains of multifunctional enzymes from Mycobacterium tuberculosis that synthesize important pharmaceuticals compounds. Dr. Cabantous completed a postdoctoral fellowship at Los Alamos in 2008 where she developed protein-protein interaction sensors based on tripartite split-GFP systems. That same year, she was offered a research position in Toulouse at the Institut National de la Santé et de la Recherche Médicale (INSERM) in the field of molecular immunology. She intends to adapt the split-GFP technologies to mammalian cells and to study intercellular protein transfers in vivo.

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