Photoinduced millisecond switching kinetics in the GFPMut2 E222Q mutant

Insight into GFPmut2 pH Dependence by Single Crystal Microspectrophotometry and X-ray Crystallography

The fluorescence of Green Fluorescent Protein (wtGFP) and variants has been exploited in distinct applications in cellular and analytical biology. GFPs emission depends on the population of the protonated (A-state) and deprotonated (B-state) forms of the chromophore. Whereas wtGFP is pH-independent, mutants in which Ser65 is replaced by either threonine or alanine (as in GFPmut2) are pH-dependent, with a p K_a around 6. Given the wtGFP pH-independence, only the structure of the protonated form was determined. The deprotonated form was deduced on the basis of the crystal structure of the Ser65Thr mutant at basic pH, assuming that it corresponds to the conformation populated in solution. Here, we present an investigation where structures of the protonated and deprotonated forms of GFPmut2 were determined from crystals grown in either MPD at pH 6 or PEG at pH 8.5, and moved to either higher or lower pH. Both crystal forms of GFPmut2 were titrated monitoring the process via polarized absorption microspectrophotometry in order to precisely correlate the protonation process with the structures. We found that (i) in solution, chromophore titration is not thermodynamically coupled with any residue and Glu222 is always protonated independent of the protonation state of the chromophore; (ii) the lack of coupling is reflected in the structural behavior of the chromophore and Glu222 environments, with only the former showing variations with pH; (iii) titrations of low-pH and high-pH grown crystals exhibit a Hill coefficient of about 0.75, indicating an anticooperative behavior not observed in solution; (iv) structures where pH was changed in the crystal point to Glu222 as the ionizable group responsible for the outset of the anticooperative behavior; and (v) in GFPmut2 the canonical GFP proton wire involving the chromophore is not interrupted at the level of Ser205 and Glu222 at basic pH as in the Ser65Thr mutant. This allows proposing the structure of the deprotonated state of GFPmut2 as an alternative model for the analogous state of wtGFP.

Hidden photoinduced reactivity of the blue fluorescent protein mKalama1

We report a complete photocycle of the blue fluorescent protein exhibiting two delayed branches coupled to hidden proton transfer events.

Optically modulatable blue fluorescent proteins

Blue fluorescent proteins (BFPs) offer visualization of protein location and behavior, but often suffer from high autofluorescent background and poor signal discrimination. Through dual-laser excitation of bright and photoinduced dark states, mutations to the residues surrounding the BFP chromophore enable long-wavelength optical modulation of BFP emission. Such dark state engineering enables violet-excited blue emission to be increased upon lower energy, green coillumination. Turning this green coillumination on and off at a specific frequency dynamically modulates collected blue fluorescence without generating additional background. Interpreted as transient photoconversion between neutral cis and anionic trans chromophoric forms, mutations tune photoisomerization and ground state tautomerizations to enable long-wavelength depopulation of the millisecond-lived, spectrally shifted dark states. Single mutations to the tyrosine-based blue fluorescent protein T203V/S205V exhibit enhanced modulation depth and varied frequency. Importantly, analogous single point mutations in the nonmodulatable BFP, mKalama1, creates a modulatable variant. Building modulatable BFPs offers opportunities for improved BFP signal discrimination vs background, greatly enhancing their utility.

Signal Discrimination Between Fluorescent Proteins in Live Cells by Long-wavelength Optical Modulation

Fluorescent proteins (FPs) have revolutionized molecular and cellular biology; yet, discrimination over cellular autofluorescence, spectral deconvolution, or detection at low concentrations remain challenging problems in many biological applications. By optically depopulating a photoinduced dark state with orange secondary laser co-excitation, the higher-energy green AcGFP fluorescence is dynamically increased. Modulating this secondary laser then modulates the higher-energy, collected fluorescence; enabling its selective detection by removing heterogeneous background from other FPs. Order-of-magnitude reduction in obscuring fluorophore background emission has been achieved in both fixed and live cells. This longwavelength modulation expands the dimensionality to discriminate FP emitters based on dark state lifetimes and enables signal of interest to be recovered by removing heterogeneous background emitter signals. Thus, AcGFP is not only useful for extracting weak signals from systems plagued by high background, but it is a springboard for further FP optimization and utilization for improving sensitivity and selectivity in biological fluorescence imaging.

Structure and single crystal spectroscopy of Green Fluorescent Proteins

Usually, spectroscopic data on proteins in solution are interpreted at molecular level on the basis of the three-dimensional structures determined in the crystalline state. While it is widely recognized that the protein crystal structures are reliable models for the solution 3D structures, nevertheless it is also clear that sometimes the crystallization process can introduce some "artifacts" that can make difficult or even flaw the attempt to correlate the properties in solution with those in the crystalline state. In general, therefore, it would be desirable to identify some sort of control. In the case of the spectroscopic properties of proteins, the most straightforward check is to acquire data not only in solution but also on the crystals. In this regard, the Green Fluorescent Protein (GFP) is an interesting case in that a massive quantity of data correlating the spectroscopic properties in solution with the structural information in the crystalline state is available in literature. Despite that, a relatively limited amount of spectroscopic studies on single crystals of GFP or related FPs have been described. Here we review and discuss the main spectroscopic (in solution) and structural (in crystals) studies performed on the GFP and related fluorescent proteins, together with the spectroscopic analyses on various FPs members in the crystalline state. One main conclusion is that "in cristallo" spectroscopic studies are useful in providing new opportunities for gathering information not available in solution and are highly recommended to reliably correlate solution properties with structural features. This article is part of a Special Issue entitled: Protein Structure and Function in the Crystalline State.