Development of a Novel Ligand Binding Assay for Estrogen Receptor

摘要

Nuclear receptors undergo conformational changes when they bind ligands. It should be possible to monitor these changes in vivo using energy transfer between fluorophores. The existence of inherently fluorescent proteins such as the variants of jellyfish green fluorescent protein (GFP) suggests that this problem may be approached by making fusions of these proteins to nuclear receptors. We set out to study this problem using the estrogen receptor (ER), a nuclear receptor known to undergo a conformational change upon ligand binding.