‘Frankenbodies’ Light Up Live Cells

A research group in Japan has created hybrid antibodies that can bind to and label specific targets in living cells.

AsianScientist (Aug. 16, 2019) – Scientists can now observe intracellular processes more clearly using a ‘frankenbody’ invented by researchers in Japan. These findings have been published in Nature Communications.

Antibodies are the biomolecules our immune systems deploy to find, tag and destroy invading pathogens. They work by binding to specific targets, called epitopes, on the surfaces of invading organisms or substances.

For many decades, scientists have cleverly exploited this selective tagging mechanism in natural antibodies to engineer antibody-based probes that let them purify and study different types of proteins within cells. One tried and true technique, epitope tagging, involves fusing an epitope to a protein of interest and using fluorescently labeled antibodies to make those proteins visible, but only in fixed, dead cells.

Now, a cross-disciplinary team of researchers from the Tokyo Institute of Technology, Japan, and Colorado State University (CSU), US, have added a new tool to the arsenal of antibody-based probes. What makes their approach different is the fact that the probes they developed are genetically encoded, which means that they can be used to label living cells. The team named their probes ‘frankenbodies’ because the protein consists of antibody fragments and scaffolding proteins grafted together.

“We’re interested in intracellular antibodies because you can use them as imaging reagents in a live cell,” said Assistant Professor Timothy J. Stasevich at CSU. “You don’t need a tag like a green fluorescent protein, because instead you have this fluorescent antibody that will bind to your protein that you want to visualize.”

Furthermore, because the frankenbodies are genetically encoded on a plasmid, they can be easily distributed to other labs. This is in contrast to traditional antibodies, which can cost a lab several hundreds of dollars per order due to the need for cold chain logistics.

“We have several new imaging reagents in the works that build off of this success, so I see great things ahead,” said Stasevich.



The article can be found at: Zhao et al. (2019) A Genetically Encoded Probe for Imaging Nascent and Mature HA-tagged Proteins in vivo.

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Source: Tokyo Institute of Technology.
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