Powerful technique allows scientists to study how proteins change shape
inside cells

Date:
October 18, 2021
Source:
University of North Carolina Health Care
Summary:
The scientists' new 'binder-tag' technique allows researchers
to pinpoint and track proteins that are in a desired shape or
'conformation,' and to do so in real time inside living cells. The
scientists demonstrated the technique in, essentially, movies
that track the active version of an important signaling protein --
a molecule, in this case, important for cell growth.



FULL STORY ========================================================================== Understanding how proteins bend, twist, and shape-shift as they go about
their work in cells is enormously important for understanding normal
biology and diseases. But a deep understanding of protein dynamics
has generally been elusive due to the lack of good imaging methods of
proteins at work. Now, for the first time, scientists at the UNC School
of Medicine have invented a method that could enable this field to take
a great leap forward.


==========================================================================
The scientists' new "binder-tag" technique, described in a paper in
Cell, allows researchers to pinpoint and track proteins that are in
a desired shape or "conformation," and to do so in real time inside
living cells. The scientists demonstrated the technique in, essentially,
movies that track the active version of an important signaling protein --
a molecule, in this case, important for cell growth.

"No one has been able to develop a method that can do, in such a
generalizable way, what this method does. So I think it could have
a very big impact," said study co-senior author Klaus Hahn, PhD, the
Ronald G. Thurman Distinguished Professor of Pharmacology, and director
of the UNC-Olympus Imaging Center, at UNC School of Medicine.

The work was a collaboration between Hahn's laboratory and the laboratory
of imaging analysis expert Timothy Elston, PhD, professor of pharmacology
and co- director of the Computational Medicine Program at the UNC School
of Medicine.

Filming the very small The new method, like all biological imaging
techniques, addresses the fundamental problem that many of the molecules
at work in living cells cannot be visualized directly and precisely with
an ordinary light microscope. Down at the scales where proteins operate,
light flows in enormous waves that bend around things and cannot render
objects sharply.



==========================================================================
One approach to this problem, especially when proteins need to be imaged
in their normal live-cell habitats, has been to tag the targeted proteins
with fluorescent beacons, so that at least the beacons' light emissions
can be seen and captured directly with microscopy -- for example to
map the places where a particular protein works in a cell. A technique
called FRET (Fo"rster resonant energy transfer), which relies upon
exotic quantum effects, embeds pairs of such beacons in target proteins
in such a way that their light changes as the protein's conformation
changes. This allows some study of protein dynamics as they shape-shift
inside cells. But FRET and other existing methods have limitations,
such as weak fluorescent signals, that greatly limit their utility.

The new binder-tag method starts with the insertion of a tiny molecular
"tag" within a protein being studied, and the use of a separate molecule
that binds to the tag only when the tag-containing protein takes a certain shape or conformation, such as when the protein is active to help a cell perform a particular function. Placing appropriate fluorescent beacons
within the binder and/or the tag molecule effectively allows a researcher
to image, over time, the precise locations of tagged proteins that are
in a particular conformation of interest.

The method is compatible with a wide range of beacons, including much
more efficient ones than the interacting beacon pairs required for
ordinary FRET.

Binder-tag can even be used to build FRET sensors more easily, Hahn said.

Moreover, the binder-tag molecules were chosen so that nothing in cells
can react with them and interfere with their imaging role.

The net result, according to Hahn, is a robust technique that in principle
can handle a broad variety of protein-dynamics studies previously out
of reach, including studies of proteins only sparsely present in cells.

In the Cell paper, Hahn and colleagues discuss several proof-of-principle demonstrations. They used the new method to image an important
growth-signaling protein called Src to reveal, in unprecedented detail,
how it forms tiny islands of activity. This, in turn, enabled the
researchers to analyze factors affecting the protein's biological roles.

"With this method we can see, for example, how microenvironmental
differences across a cell affect, often profoundly, what a protein is
doing," Hahn said.

Now the researchers are using the technique to map the dynamics of other important proteins. They are also doing further demonstrations to show
how binder-tag can be tailored to capture the dynamics of very diverse
protein structures and functions, not just proteins that work like Src.

The scientists envision that binder-tag ultimately will become a basic
enabling technique for studying normal proteins, larger multi-molecular structures in cells, and even the dysfunctional proteins associated with diseases such as Alzheimer's.

"For a lot of protein-related diseases, scientists haven't been able to understand why proteins start to do the wrong thing," Hahn said. "The
tools for obtaining that understanding just haven't been available." ========================================================================== Story Source: Materials provided by
University_of_North_Carolina_Health_Care. Note: Content may be edited
for style and length.


========================================================================== Journal Reference:
1. Bei Liu, Orrin J. Stone, Michael Pablo, J. Cody Herron, Ana
T. Nogueira,
Onur Dagliyan, Jonathan B. Grimm, Luke D. Lavis, Timothy
C. Elston, Klaus M. Hahn. Biosensors based on peptide exposure
show single molecule conformations in live cells. Cell, 2021;
DOI: 10.1016/j.cell.2021.09.026 ==========================================================================

Link to news story: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2021/10/211018150652.htm

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