AsianScientist (Mar. 27, 2015) – Researchers have developed a fluorescent probe that can trace tens of thousands of tagged proteins inside living cells. They have published their findings in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and filed for patents in the US and Europe.
The new fluorescent probe is an inexpensive and effective tool for real-time monitoring of cell activities. It’s potential applications include visualizing the invasion events of pathogenic microbes, assessing the effectiveness of target drugs on cancer cells and to understanding drug resistance in bacteria, among others.
It will facilitate drug screening for future drug discovery, in particular the development of more effective target drugs. The fluorescent probe may also be applied to agricultural advancements in developing plant species with favorable genetic variations.
Scientists frequently use genetic modification so that proteins of interest can be marked for purification and/or observation. One such tag, termed a hexahistidine-tag (His-tag), has been used for many years because it is simple and has minimal effect on perturbing the natural functioning of a protein of interest. Large libraries with tens of thousands of proteins each individually encoded with this small tag have thus been developed in recent years.
To take advantage of this existing resource, a team of researchers led by Professor Sun Hongzhe at the University of Hong Kong has developed a novel fluorescent probe to rapidly label intracellular tagged proteins at only one-fourth of the cost of current methods.
Challenges include getting the probe across the cell membrane and ensuring the probe does not disturb the natural functions of the target proteins. After three-year of efforts, Sun’s team has created a small molecule-based fluorescent probe that overcomes these challenges.
The research team has also developed probes with different colors to enable the observation of the precise localization of multiple proteins within the same cells simultaneously, which is critical to understand how proteins interact with one another. These probes can be readily applied to visualize the actions of drugs on their targets in cells in facilitating drug screening for future drug discovery.
The article can be found at: Lai et al. (2015) Rapid Labeling of Intracellular His-tagged Proteins in Living Cells.
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Source: The University of Hong Kong.
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