A noncytotoxic DsRed variant for whole-cell labeling

摘要

Fluorescent proteins (FPs) are extremely useful tools for whole-cell, tissue, and animal labeling. For these purposes, FPs may be monomeric or oligomeric, but should meet the criteria of being tolerated at high expression levels in cells and having desirable photophysical properties.rnOur goal was to create a variant of DsRed-Express that maintains the brightness, fast-maturation, and photostability of this protein, while exhibiting decreased cytotoxicity. For this purpose, we mutated the surface of DsRed-Express to decrease aggregation and created DsRed-Express2. DsRed-Express2 retains the favorable photophysical properties of DsRed-Express while showing dramatically reduced cytotoxicity and higher expression in bacterial and mammalian systems. Further, it was shown that DsRed-Express2 outperforms other red FPs as a label for bacterial and mammalian cells.