{"id":152052,"date":"2022-12-07T11:23:05","date_gmt":"2022-12-07T17:23:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2022\/12\/small-fluorescent-protein-helps-to-create-more-detailed-biomedical-images"},"modified":"2022-12-07T11:23:05","modified_gmt":"2022-12-07T17:23:05","slug":"small-fluorescent-protein-helps-to-create-more-detailed-biomedical-images","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2022\/12\/small-fluorescent-protein-helps-to-create-more-detailed-biomedical-images","title":{"rendered":"Small Fluorescent Protein Helps to Create More Detailed Biomedical Images"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/small-fluorescent-protein-helps-to-create-more-detailed-biomedical-images2.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Imaging deep tissues with light is challenging. Visible light is often quickly absorbed and scattered by structures and molecules in the body, preventing researchers from seeing deeper than a millimeter within a tissue. If they do manage to probe further, substances like collagen or melanin often muddy the image, creating the equivalent of background noise through their natural fluorescence. As the authors explained, \u201cBiological tissues have strong optical attenuation in the visible wavelength range (350\u2013700 nm), due to the absorption of hemoglobin and melanin, as well as the tissue scattering, which fundamentally limits the imaging depth of high-resolution optical technologies.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>To wade out from these muddied waters, Yao and collaborator Vladislav Verkhusha, PhD, professor of genetics at Albert Einstein College of Medicine, developed a protein that absorbs and emits longer wavelengths of light in the near-infrared (NIR) spectrum. \u201cTissue is the most transparent in the 700\u20111300 nm window of NIR light,\u201d said Yao. \u201cAt those wavelengths, light can penetrate deeper into a tissue, and because there is less natural background fluorescence to filter out, we can take longer exposures and capture clearer images.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Verkhusha and his lab used a process called directed molecular evolution to engineer their proteins, using photoreceptors normally found in bacteria as the basis for the structure. \u201cThe state-of-the-art NIR FPs were engineered from bacterial phytochrome photoreceptors (BphPs),\u201d the team noted. \u201cApplying rational design, we developed 17 kDa cyanobacteriochrome-based near-infrared (NIR-I) fluorescent protein, miRFP718nano.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Imaging deep tissues with light is challenging. Visible light is often quickly absorbed and scattered by structures and molecules in the body, preventing researchers from seeing deeper than a millimeter within a tissue. If they do manage to probe further, substances like collagen or melanin often muddy the image, creating the equivalent of background noise [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":599,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1902,11,385,412],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-152052","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bioengineering","category-biotech-medical","category-evolution","category-genetics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/152052","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/599"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=152052"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/152052\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=152052"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=152052"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=152052"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}