Simultaneous Time-Lamination Imaging of Protein Association Using a Split Fluorescent Timer Protein

Studies of temporal behaviors of protein association in living cells are crucially important for elucidating the fundamental roles and the mechanism of interactive coordination for cell activities. We developed a method for investigating the temporal alternation of a particular protein assembly using monomeric fluorescent proteins, fluorescent timers (FTs), of which the fluorescent color changes from blue to red over time. We identified a dissection site of the FTs, which allows complementation of the split FT fragments. The split fragments of each FT variant recovered their fluorescence and maintained inherent rates of the color changes upon the reassembly of the fragments in vitro. We applied this method to visualize the aggregation process of α-synuclein in living cells. The size of the aggregates with the temporal information was analyzed from ratio values of the blue and red fluorescence of the reconstituted FTs, from which the aggregation rates were evaluated. This method using the split FT fragments enables tracing and visualizing temporal alternations of various protein associations by single fluorescence measurements at a given time point

Spectral Mining for Discriminating Blood Origins in the Presence of Substrate Interference via Attenuated Total Reflection Fourier Transform Infrared Spectroscopy: Postmortem or Antemortem Blood?

Often in criminal investigations, discrimination of types of body fluid evidence is crucially important to ascertain how a crime was committed. Compared to current methods using biochemical techniques, vibrational spectroscopic approaches can provide versatile applicability to identify various body fluid types without sample invasion. However, their applicability is limited to pure body fluid samples because important signals from body fluids incorporated in a substrate are affected strongly by interference from substrate signals. Herein, we describe a novel approach to recover body fluid signals that are embedded in strong substrate interferences using attenuated total reflection Fourier transform infrared (ATR FT-IR) spectroscopy and an innovative multivariate spectral processing. This technique supported detection of covert features of body fluid signals, and then identified origins of body fluid stains on substrates. We discriminated between ATR FT-IR spectra of postmortem blood (PB) and those of antemortem blood (AB) by creating a multivariate statistics model. From ATR FT-IR spectra of PB and AB stains on interfering substrates (polyester, cotton, and denim), blood-originated signals were extracted by a weighted linear regression approach we developed originally using principal components of both blood and substrate spectra. The blood-originated signals were finally classified by the discriminant model, demonstrating high discriminant accuracy. The present method can identify body fluid evidence independently of the substrate type, which is expected to promote the application of vibrational spectroscopic techniques in forensic body fluid analysis