Back

Super-resolution live-cell mapping of protein-protein interactions using chemogenetic split reporters and STED microscopy

Board, S.; Gautier, A.

2025-08-07 biophysics
10.1101/2025.08.05.668682 bioRxiv
Show abstract

The ability to map protein-protein interactions (PPI) within living cells at high spatial resolution is essential for unravelling their roles in cellular biology. Although several super-resolution microscopy techniques are available, visualizing PPI below the diffraction limit of light across entire live cells remains a challenge. Here, we introduce an approach that combines the chemogenetic split fluorescent reporter splitFAST2 with STED microscopy for sub-diffraction imaging of PPI. As the fluorescence of splitFAST2 is activated only where the two proteins interact, this system allows for highly precise and unambiguous localization in live cells, enhanced further by the rapid super-resolution imaging capabilities of STED. The improved spatial resolution of our approach enabled us to precisely map the subcellular localization of inducible interactions or constitutive interactions. Beyond simply detecting PPIs below the diffraction limit in whole living cells, we also demonstrated that splitFAST2 can serve as the basis for fluorescent probes with very low background, enabling effective subdiffraction imaging of repetitive cellular structures like filamentous actin and microtubules.

Matching journals

The top 2 journals account for 50% of the predicted probability mass.

50% of probability mass above

"Similar papers" are the closest papers from that journal in the model's embedding space. They show what the match is built on, but the ranking comes mostly from a classifier over the whole training set, not from these examples alone.