LDAI-Based Chemical Labeling of Intact Membrane Proteins and Its Pulse-Chase Analysis under Live Cell Conditions

The functions of membrane proteins are tightly controlled by the dynamics such as protein trafficking and degradation. We demonstrated that ligand-directed acyl imidazole (LDAI) chemistry is broadly applicable to selective chemical labeling of various types of membrane-bound proteins under live cell conditions without a need for any tag fragments. The LDAI chemistry enabled pulse-chase analysis of these proteins to determine the half-life, as well as their degradation pathways by the imaging, under almost natural cellular conditions.