A Glowing ‘Orange’ — By tagging intracellular proteins with fluorescent proteins (FPs), scientists can study molecular processes in living cells. Dr. Vladislav Verkhusha and colleagues report in a recent issue of the Journal of American Chemical Society that they’ve designed a novel orange FP called LSSmOrange. It offers an extremely large difference between the wavelength of light it absorbs and the wavelength at which it fluoresces. As a result, LSSmOrange significantly broadens the usefulness of rapid microscopy imaging employing several different FPs to image living cells and tissues. When used with other FPs, LSSmOrange allows researchers to simultaneously track and quantify multiple populations of intracellular objects and to detect brief protein co-localization and protein-protein interactions. LSSmOrange will also help in designing fluorescent biosensors for studying the relationships among several biochemical activities in a living cell. Dr. Verkhusha is professor of anatomy and structural biology, a co-director of Einstein’s Fluorescent Proteins Resource Center, and a member of Einstein’s Gruss-Lipper Biophotonics Center.
Posted on: Wednesday, April 25, 2012