Overview
- Scientists at Albert Einstein College of Medicine and the Salk Institute reported the VIS-Fb imaging platform in Nature Methods on Wednesday.
- The probes stay dark until they bind their target protein, which stabilizes them and cuts background signal by up to about 100-fold.
- The modular toolkit covers colors from blue to far red, so researchers can track several proteins in the same cell at once.
- Some versions switch on or off with light, and biosensor-linked designs read out ions or metabolites for quantitative, ratiometric measurements.
- Tests in living systems showed clear signals in mouse neurons and astrocytes during behavior and real-time changes in zebrafish embryos during development and drug response.