DATE2024.11.30 #Press Releases
Making intracellular potassium ions glow red
—— Development of a high-performance chemigenetic fluorescent sensor——
Summary
A research group led by Professor Robert E. Campbell and Associate Professor Takuya Terai, working together with graduate student Dazhou Cheng (Graduate School of Science, The University of Tokyo), have developed a high-performance fluorescent sensor for potassium ions (K⁺), which play important roles in biology.
K⁺ is the most abundant metal ion in cells and plays an essential role in living organisms. A variety of fluorescent sensors had previously been created to investigate changes in the K+ concentrations in cells, but none of them combined the advantages of being localizable in target cells or organelles, high K+ selectivity, and high fluorescence response in the long-wavelength region. In this study, Cheng and coworkers reported the HaloKbp1 series of chemigenetic K⁺ sensors, which combine the HaloTag self-labeling protein, a bacterial K⁺-binding protein (Kbp), and a synthetic fluorescent dye. These sensors feature high brightness in the red to far-red region, large fluorescence intensity changes, and optimized affinities for K+. The team also demonstrated that these sensors can be used to visualize changes in K+ concentrations in cells.
This work was also selected for the Supplementary Cover of the Journal of the American Chemical Society.
Conceptual diagram of the developed fluorescent sensor
Press Release: "Let Cells Light Up with Two-Fold Sensor! (2022/09/23)
Journal
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Journal name Journal of the American Chemical Society Title of paper