Flipping a Color Switch — Thanks to fluorescent proteins (FPs), researchers now have a palette of colors to choose from when imaging cellular processes. Such photactivatable FPs enabled the winners of this year’s Nobel Prize in Chemistry to carry out the super-resolution microscopy that earned them the prize. Dr. Vladislav Verkhusha has engineered more than a dozen photoswitchable FPs for super-resolution imaging. In the October issue of Chemistry & Biology, Dr. Verkhusha and colleagues report that they’ve created a photoactivatable red FP whose absorbance and color can be switched following exposure to violet light. This photoswitchable FP can be used in super-resolution microscopy as well as in pulse-chase experiments and in multicolor photo-labeling experiments using several FPs. The first author Dr. Kiryl Piatkevich was a postdoctoral fellow in the Verkhusha lab. Dr. Verkhusha is professor of anatomy & structural biology.
Posted on: Tuesday, October 21, 2014