Protein folding in living cells
1/12/2010
Professor Martin Gruebele’s group developed a new technique which they call Fast Relaxation Imaging (FreI) to map protein folding with high spatio-temporal resolution (Nature Methods, in press). Using millisecond temperature jumps to initiate the folding process they record movies of unfolding and refolding kinetics. They analyze stability and dynamics of a fluorescent phosphoglycerate kinase construct across a bone marrow cell with nanometer resolution (see image). The new technique gives insights of how the cellular environment modifies structure and dynamics of biomolecules compared to the in vitro scenario.
For more information see: http://www.news.illinois.edu/news/10/0301protein.html