Have you ever wanted to selectively kill a subset of cells in your model system? Turns out that with light-inducible photosensitizers and a quick zap of the proper color light, you can do just that. Photosensitizing dyes and proteins have been around for awhile (check out this ...
In complex metazoans, rapid cell division and large scale cell mobility are essential processes during embryonic development. These are required for a growing organism to make the complicated transition from a clump of cells to a fully differentiated body. In contrast, these ...
Luminescent molecules are very useful tools because we can easily detect and measure the light they emit. Proteins that give off light include chemiluminescent proteins, like luciferases, as well as fluorescent ones, like Green Fluorescent Protein (GFP). These molecules occur ...
Regulating translation is key to cellular function, especially during development or stress. With ribosome profiling, researchers have been able to study the effects of various stimuli on global translation, but a visual technique to study translation remained elusive. Two ...
Signal transduction pathways are a lot like cell phone networks. Protein kinases deliver messages to the next members of their pathways, but where the kinases are located, their signal strength, and how long their signals last all impact transduction of the message. To study ...
Imagine being able to determine whether two proteins are within 10 nanometers of each other, or measure the tension in the helical structure of spider silk, or the activity of a protein in a synapse. What kinds of tools enable us to measure these properties, and what fascinating ...
The same way the human body is made up of organs, cells comprise compartments and structures, called organelles. Take a sneak peak inside a cell with the images from the Allen Cell Explorer (1). When studying the function of a protein or its role in a disease, researchers often ...
This post was contributed by guest bloggers Joachim Goedhart and Marieke Mastop from the Section of Molecular Cytology and Van Leeuwenhoek Centre for Advanced microscopy, University of Amsterdam. The previous two posts in this series described a practical approach to selecting a ...
