Timing Turnover

Two-tone fluorescent tags track the movement and life span of proteins within living cells.

kerry grens
| 1 min read

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Fluorescent proteins are invaluable tools for measuring the abundance and trafficking of other proteins in a cell. A bigger challenge has been to monitor a protein’s life cycle—its intracellular movements and its turnover—which requires a timer to indicate a protein’s age. Earlier iterations of fluorescent timers used one protein that changed color over time, “but this is at the expense of sensitivity and brightness,” says Michael Knop of the University of Heidelberg.

To improve upon the idea of a fluorescent timer, Knop and his colleagues fused two different fluorescent proteins to produce a timer that glows with different colors and intensities depending on the age of the target protein. The first of the fluorescent proteins, superfolder GFP (sfGFP), reaches peak intensity very quickly, while the ...

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Meet the Author

  • kerry grens

    Kerry Grens

    Kerry served as The Scientist’s news director until 2021. Before joining The Scientist in 2013, she was a stringer for Reuters Health, the senior health and science reporter at WHYY in Philadelphia, and the health and science reporter at New Hampshire Public Radio. Kerry got her start in journalism as a AAAS Mass Media fellow at KUNC in Colorado. She has a master’s in biological sciences from Stanford University and a biology degree from Loyola University Chicago.

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