Mitosis plays an essential role in growth and cellular replacement, and is often dysregulated in cancers, making the process of therapeutic interest. Researchers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC Chapel Hill) are developing novel cell imaging tools to help them classify key components of mitosis and identify new therapeutic targets.
The lab’s aim is to follow this complex signaling cascade at the molecular level, which requires the development of novel fluorescence microscopy tools for requiring a high content screening.
The joint UNC Chapel Hill team has developed a unique fluorescence-based ‘binder/tag’ approach capable of reporting the conformational changes of individual molecules in live cells (see figure). The advantage of this system is that only a very short, seven-peptide tag is inserted into the protein of interest, minimizing the risk of disruption to normal protein or cellular function. The team is now developing and optimizing cell lines with a range of tagged proteins for high content screening.
