Applications
- Oligomeric size determination of cellular receptors or other membrane-bound proteins
- High-throughput screening of drug candidates targeting protein-protein interactions
- Live-cell imaging
Target Problems
Probing protein association, or oligomerization, in cells is an important problem in life sciences. Determining the size of their oligomers, or the timing of the oligomerization onset pose substantial experimental challenges, with different studies often producing contradicting results. Existing technologies either are laborious and slow or lack the bandwidth needed to discriminate between different oligomeric sizes and expression levels (i.e., concentrations).
Key Features
- High Throughput – Can produce and analyze a complete set of data (for one receptor) in one day or less.
- High Selectivity and Sensitivity – Capable of determining identity, abundance, and stability of oligomers.
- Wide Applications – Can be used to quantify any protein that can be fluorescently tagged.
Technology
A molecular brightness-based determination algorithm is incorporated into a user-friendly computer program suite for extracting oligomer size and concentration from images of fluorescently tagged membrane proteins. This method, termed two-dimensional fluorescence intensity fluctuation (FIF) spectrometry, which can generate ‘spectrograms’ consisting of frequencies of occurrence of brightness-concentration pairs of values across pixels of fluorescence images of cells expressing molecules labeled with single fluorescent tags, and unmixes the spectrograms to determine the proportion of different oligomer sizes. The computer program suite is capable of producing a complete set of data per type of sample in less than one day using a standard personal computer.
Intellectual Property
Copyrighted Software available for no charge for first 15 days and at discounted rate for non-commercial use. Please contact us for commercial use. This technology – including experimental design, measurements, and data analysis – is also available as a service to commercial and non-commercial customers.
Inventors
Dr. Valerica Raicu, Department of Physics, UW-Milwaukee
Download Non-Confidential Summary
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