Researchers from MIT developed a technique to induce cells to record the history of cellular events in a long protein chain that can be imaged using a light microscope. The technique could help understand the critical steps involved in the processes, such as memory formation, response to drug treatment, and gene expression.
Studying the molecular processes within cells can provide important insights into their function and how they contribute to the overall functioning of an organ. However, most techniques for imaging cells only allow researchers to obtain a snapshot of a single moment in time, which can be limited in understanding the dynamic processes occurring within cells.
“Biological systems are often composed of a large number of different types of cells. To understand those kinds of biological systems, we need to observe physiological events over time in these large cell populations,” said Changyang Linghu, Assistant Professor at the Michigan Neuroscience Institute and author of the study.
A research team from MIT came up with the idea of recording cellular events as a series of protein subunits that are continuously added to a chain. To create their chains, they used engineered protein subunits that can self-assemble into long filaments. These protein subunits are absent in living cells.
Using encoding, researchers designed a system to continuously produce one of the protein subunits within cells while the other subunit is only produced in response to a specific event.
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