UCLA group develops method for imaging protein-protein interactions in live animals

摘要

Let's say your company has identified a certain protein-protein interaction as critical to an important disease process, or perhaps to the mechanism of action of a drug lead. Imagine being able to monitor that interaction in intact live animals, inreal time, in particular tissues. Researchers led by Sanjiv Gambhir at the Univ. of California-Los Angeles (UCLA) (Los Angeles, CA) are making that dream a reality. They published a report in the Feb. 19 advance online edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences showing how they succeeded in quantitatively imaging a protein-protein interaction that's induced by tumor necrosis factor-#alpha# (TNF-#alpha#), in live mice without hurting the animals. Their approach essentially adapts the yeast two-hybrid system, long a staple method for analyzing protein-protein interactions in cell culture, to living animals. Making this possible is the recent development of cooled charge-coupled device (CCD) cameras that can detect extremely low levels ofvisible light. It's the same basic technology as the CCDs in video and digital cameras, but the devices are so sensitive that they can pick up light emitted from the internal organs of animals.