Session Speaker

Far-red fluorescent tags for protein labeling
Dmitry S. Shcherbo, Andrey G. Zaraisky, Michael W. Davidson, Dmitriy M. Chudakov


Of late years the research of fluorescent proteins has attained a remarkable progress. An enormous amount of bright versatile tags has been introduced into modern microscopy. Low toxicity, high stability and autocatalytic host-independent chromophore formation made them indispensable tools for in vivo studies. However, low brightness has remained a problem in far-red variants, which hampers multicolour labelling and whole-body imaging techniques. Here we report monomeric mKate2 and pseudomonomeric tdKatushka2 – two novel super-bright far-red fluorescent proteins. Designed for excellent performance in fusions these genetically encoded tags reveal high fluorescence stability, low toxicity and outstanding brightness (mKate2 is 3-fold brighter than the previously reported mKate and is 10-fold brighter than mPlum; tdKatushka2 is 4-fold brighter than mRaspberry or mCherry in near-IR range). These features make mKate2 and tdKatushka2 ideal tools for fluorescent imaging of protein localization and motility in living cells and animals.