Nature: a powerful tool for protein analysis

Bioscience report: scientists have always been interested in protein interaction in cells, because protein interaction can reveal the most basic life functions, such as cell division Scientists at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory have developed new techniques for studying protein behavior in living cells, which were published in the March 17 issue of Nature Biotechnology For the first time, this technology allows people to track the protein network that promotes a biological process in real time, which can be used to study the pathogenesis of specific diseases and help pharmaceutical companies develop new drug targets Single molecule detection has great potential in the field of life science Fluorescence correlation spectroscopy (FCS) is one of them FCS was born in the 1970s, mainly through fluorescent labeling in living cells to study the dynamics of biological molecules FCS can detect and locate the dynamics of different proteins Such data has high research value However, FCS microanalysis is rather troublesome, and data interpretation is also relatively difficult Currently, it is limited to a small number of short-term protein experiments (extended reading: three new tools for protein purification) To this end, researchers at EMBL developed high-throughput FCS Technology (ht-fcs) Ht-fcs can realize automatic screening, delayed data acquisition and data analysis, and is a powerful tool for studying proteome dynamics in living cells "This method can save a lot of time," explains Malte wachsmuth, co-author of the article "Previously, researchers might have spent a day observing a protein in a small number of cells, and we could automatically obtain dozens of protein data in thousands of cells." In order to demonstrate the practicality of ht-fcs, the researchers used this technique to analyze the dynamics of 53 nuclear proteins They obtained 60000 test values in 10000 living human cells, and used these physiological parameters to classify proteins according to chromosome binding and complex formation "We developed FCS as a high-throughput technology to simultaneously obtain a large amount of protein data This ability is useful for studying biological networks, which typically include dozens or even hundreds of components, "said Jan Ellenberg Researchers believe that high throughput and robust performance make ht-fcs widely used to help people analyze the dynamics of protein networks in living cells.