Chemicals and Drugs Commons^™

Repurposing The Calcium Biosensor Twitch-2b: Creating Transition Metal Detection Proteins Through Fluorescent Analysis, Sarah Mateer

Honors Projects and Presentations: Undergraduate

Metal ions are key in regulating many biological functions, but their accumulation is associated with neurological diseases. Cellular metal ion concentrations are often detected through exogenous fluorescent dyes, but less invasive and more specific detection can be done using genetically encoded FRET-enabled metal-binding proteins, such as Twitch-2B. Twitch-2B and other ratiometric proteins change conformation when a calcium ion is bound to the active site, initiating an energy transfer between two fluorescent peptides that can be quantified through fluorescent spectroscopy. Previous analyses have demonstrated that wild-type calcium binding can be accurately detected via this method for concentrations from 10 uM to …