Top content

Talk by Kristina Ganzinger

Title: "DNA-PAINT single-particle tracking (DNA-PAINT-SPT) enables extended single-molecule studies of membrane protein interactions"
Occasion: Joint CellNanOs and SFB - Seminar
Start: 23.01.2024 - 16:15
Location: CellNanOs, 38/201

About the speaker: Dr. Kristina Ganzinger conducts research about Physics of Cellular Interactions at the NWO physics institute AMOLF, Amsterdam.

Abstract of the talk: Quantifying protein-protein interactions in cell membranes is key to understand many cellular processes, including a cell’s communication with its surroundings via cell surface receptors. While single-molecule tracking is a valuable tool to measure receptor-ligand interaction kinetics in cell membranes, photobleaching limits the observation times of individual molecules to only a few seconds with commonly-used fluorescent proteins or dyes. In practice, this makes it often hard to reliably distinguish real interactions from random colocalization events. Here, we show that this limitation can be overcome by a new labelling method based on DNA-PAINT, with fluorescently-labelled oligonucleotides transiently binding to a complementary DNA strand attached to the molecule of interest. I will show that DNA-PAINT based single-particle tracking (DNA-PAINT-SPT) can be readily combined with existing protein tagging methods, such as SNAP tags or nanobodies. I will report on leveraging this technique from a proof-of-principle implementation to a useful tool for the SPT community.