Name: monitoring kinase and phosphatase activities through the cell cycle by ratiometric fret
Uploaded: 2012-01-27T12:00:00
Description: Watch this Scientific Journal Video about Monitoring Kinase and Phosphatase Activities Through the Cell Cycle by Ratiometric FRET at JoVE.com

The authors are supported by the Swedish research council, the Swedish foundation for strategic research, the Swedish cancer society, the Swedish child cancer society, &Aring;ke Wibergs foundation and Jeanssons foundation.

1. Introducing the probe to cells
<ol>
 <li>Co-transfect cells with a FRET-based probe and a plasmid conferring resistance. Choose a transfection method that is efficient in your cell-type of interest. For U2OS cells, standard calcium phosphate transfection methods give adequate results15.</li>
 <li>Select cells in the appropriate antibiotic for at least seven days. This enriches the amount of cells expressing the probe and limits the amount of cells with toxic expression levels, or expression levels that se...

<ol>
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Monitoring FRET throughout the cell cycle requires considerations that are less crucial when assessing short-term responses to external stimuli. First, cell cycle progression is easily perturbed by stress signaling, requiring that phototoxicity is kept to a minimum. Second, all reporters can potentially affect cellular processes by titrating out kinases, phosphatases or interaction domains. The probably most straightforward way to assess if the experimental conditions are adequate is to measure the cell cycle length from...

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monitoring kinase and phosphatase activities through the cell cycle by ratiometric fret

F&ouml;rster resonance energy transfer (FRET)-based reporters1 allow the assessment of endogenous kinase and phosphatase activities in living cells. Such probes typically consist of variants of CFP and YFP, intervened by a phosphorylatable sequence and a phospho-binding domain. Upon phosphorylation, the probe changes conformation, which results in a change of the distance or orientation between CFP and YFP, leading to a change in FRET efficiency (Fig 1). Several probes have been published during the last decade, monitoring the activity balance of multiple kinases and phosphatases, including reporters of PKA2, PKB3, PKC4, PKD5, ERK6, JNK7, Cdk18, Aurora B9 and Plk19. Given the modular design, additional probes are likely to emerge in the near future10. 
Progression through the cell cycle is affected by stress signaling pathways 11. Notably, the cell cycle is regulated differently during unperturbed growth compared to when cells are recovering from stress12.Time-lapse imaging of cells through the cell cycle therefore requires particular caution. This becomes a problem particularly when employing ratiometric imaging, since two images with a high signal to noise ratio are required to correctly interpret the results. Ratiometric FRET imaging of cell cycle dependent changes in kinase and phosphatase activities has predominately been restricted to sub-sections of the cell cycle8,9,13,14.
Here, we discuss a method to monitor FRET-based probes using ratiometric imaging throughout the human cell cycle. The method relies on equipment that is available to many researchers in life sciences and does not require expert knowledge of microscopy or image processing.

Watch this Scientific Journal Video about Monitoring Kinase and Phosphatase Activities Through the Cell Cycle by Ratiometric FRET at JoVE.com

Monitoring Kinase and Phosphatase Activities Through the Cell Cycle by Ratiometric FRET

FRET-based reporters are increasingly used to monitor kinase and phosphatase activities in live cells. Here we describe a method on how to use FRET-based reporters to assess cell cycle-dependent changes in target phosphorylation.

F&ouml;rster resonance energy transfer (FRET)-based reporters1 allow the assessment of endogenous kinase and phosphatase activities in living cells. Such ...

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