Journal
NATURE BIOTECHNOLOGY
Volume 34, Issue 7, Pages 774-+Publisher
NATURE PUBLISHING GROUP
DOI: 10.1038/nbt.3563
Keywords
-
Categories
Funding
- US National Institutes of Health [R01-CA186568, R37NS029169, P41 GM103412, R01GM086197]
- Howard Hughes Medical Institute Collaborative Initiative Award
- NSFGR fellowship
- NDSEG fellowship
Ask authors/readers for more resources
Intercellular protein-protein interactions (PPIs) enable communication between cells in diverse biological processes, including cell proliferation, immune responses, infection, and synaptic transmission, but they are challenging to visualize because existing techniques(1-3) have insufficient sensitivity and/or specificity. Here we report a split horseradish peroxidase (sHRP) as a sensitive and specific tool for the detection of intercellular PPIs. The two sHRP fragments, engineered through screening of 17 cut sites in HRP followed by directed evolution, reconstitute into an active form when driven together by an intercellular PPI, producing bright fluorescence or contrast for electron microscopy. Fusing the sHRP fragments to the proteins neurexin (NRX) and neuroligin (NLG), which bind each other across the synaptic cleft(4), enabled sensitive visualization of synapses between specific sets of neurons, including two classes of synapses in the mouse visual system. sHRP should be widely applicable to studying mechanisms of communication between a variety of cell types.
Authors
I am an author on this paper
Click your name to claim this paper and add it to your profile.
Reviews
Recommended
No Data Available