Aequorea victoria, a bioluminescent jellyfish species

Pull on your lab coats, friends. We’re about to learn about one of the scientific methods used in the Remedy Plan lab that allow us to see if a gene is being expressed. Don’t worry, I’ll get to the jellyfish.

A lot of biological research today is conducted on really small scales. The invention of the microscope allowed us to see what was once invisible — cells, microbes, bacteria — and led to a multitude of scientific discoveries that changed human civilization. But the type of research Remedy Plan conducts requires us to see things much, much smaller than a single bacterium.

In our work, we need to zoom even smaller than cells to see whether a gene is turned on or off. Even the most high-tech microscopes can make observing this phenomenon a challenging (and sometimes impossible) task.

This is where the jellyfish come in. Or more specifically, the green fluorescent protein found in bioluminescent jellyfish. Scientists can attach a fluorescent “tag” to a gene of interest and use those markers to actually see whether the genes are active.

Let’s say that you are a scientist in a big helium balloon looking down over a giant football stadium, filled with people. And for some reason, you are researching some extremely specific phenomena — let’s say, the sneezing patterns of people wearing baseball caps. It would be hard enough to see which people are wearing baseball caps from your vantage point, but identifying the moment they sneeze would be impossible. But what if you could tag all the people wearing baseball caps with a bright neon light that flashed every time they sneezed? Suddenly you would be able to pick out the sneezers among the crowds and measure things like how frequently they sneeze, whether they are concentrated on the home or away side, or if changing the recipe of the nacho cheese results in fewer achoos.

This is analogous to the methods many scientists use to see whether a specific gene of interest is being expressed. By attaching a fluorescent protein from a jellyfish to a gene, what was once too small to see with the strongest of microscopes is suddenly revealed in color! Turns out jellyfish are not just beautiful stingers after all — they may hold a key to unlocking breakthrough cancer research.

For more details on how Remedy Plan uses fluorescent tagging in our science, see our earlier blog post on Technicolor Technology.