Analysis of tau dynamics within living cells: New applications for photoactivatable proteins

C. WEISSMANN; H.J. REYHER,; H.J. STEINHOFF; R. BRANDT

Osnabrick, Alemania

Simposio; 3rd Westerberger Herbsttagung CELL AND BRAIN IMAGING plus: A Neurobiological View of Plants - Grey, White and Green Matter; 2006

University of Osnabruck, Neurobiology department

The mutation of GFP to obtain the PA-GFP (Photoactivatable GFP) molecule has increased the possibilities of studying the presence and distribution of different proteins within cells by allowing the studying a subpopulation of molecules photoactivated by will without the need of the high energy used in FRAP experiments and been able to ignore any new synthesised molecule throughout the analysis. To our knowledge, so far, the "photoactivation approach"/photoactivatable molecules have/ has been used mainly to study movement of intracellular components in a qualitative way and to correlate to Fluorescence Recovery after Photobleaching (FRAP). Here, we describe a system that permits the analysis of the dynamic properties of a cytoskeletal protein in living cells.