Scientists used lanthanide-binding tags to image proteins at the level of a cell membrane, opening new doors for studies on health and medicine.
A team of scientists including researchers at the National Synchrotron Light Source II (NSLS-II)—a U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Science User Facility at DOE’s Brookhaven National Laboratory—have demonstrated a new technique for imaging proteins in 3-D with nanoscale resolution. Their work, published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society, enables researchers to identify the precise location of proteins within individual cells, reaching the resolution of the cell membrane and the smallest subcellular organelles.
“In the structural biology world, scientists use techniques like x-ray crystallography and cryo-electron microscopy to learn about the precise structure of proteins and infer their functions, but we don’t learn where they function in a cell,” said corresponding author and NSLS-II scientist Lisa Miller. “If you’re studying a particular disease, you need to know if a protein is functioning in the wrong place or not at all.”
The new technique developed by Miller and her colleagues is similar in style to traditional methods of fluorescence microscopy in biology, in which a molecule called green fluorescent protein (GFP) can be attached to other proteins to reveal their location. When GFP is exposed to UV or visible light, it fluoresces a bright green color, illuminating an otherwise “invisible” protein in the cell.
>Read more on the National Synchrotron Light Source II (NSLS-II) website
Image: Ultrabright x-rays revealed the concentration of erbium (yellow) and zinc (red) in a single E.coli cell expressing a lanthanide-binding tag and incubated with erbium.