Question

If you wanted to be able to see where a specific protein is located within a cell and/or observe its movement over time, how might you accomplish this? “Looking through a microscope” is not a sufficient answer in and of itself. We can’t see the standard cellular form of proteins using most microscopy techniques and the ones that would allow us to directly view some of these larger native proteins require dead, specially prepared slices of cells.

Answer 1

Question

If you wanted to be able to see where a specific protein is located within a cell and/or observe its movement over time, how might you accomplish this? “Looking through a microscope” is not a sufficient answer in and of itself. We can’t see the standard cellular form of proteins using most microscopy techniques and the ones that would allow us to directly view some of these larger native proteins require dead, specially prepared slices of cells.

Answer

The location of a protein within a cell gives us some idea about its function. approximately half of the proteins generated by a cell have to be transported into different locations require to cross at least one cellular membrane. A protein contains short amino acid sequences otherwise known as molecular labels are used to address proteins for delivery to specific locations. These specific regions of the protein can be identified by fusing them to an easily detectable protein that lacks such regions (using recombinant DNA technology) and then following this surrogate protein in the cell.

Another technique that can be used to track proteins in a cell is with the help of using fluorescent proteins such as green fluorescent protein (GFP). The tagging of GFP done by attaching the gene for GFP to the gene that encodes a protein of interest. The resulting GFP protein complex behaves in the same way as the original protein and its movement can be monitored by following its fluorescence inside the cell by fluorescence microscopy.