A rather far fetched thought, but is it possible in animal models to tag the same protein with different fluorescence proteins genetically to represent production in different parts of the body (e.g., brain versus periphery) to view difference in expression that eventually make up systemic circulation levels of the particular protein?
That should be possible. Either you can try to target the protein on the genome or you bring in different engineered copies of the gene which are under control of tissue specific promoters. A slightly different, but still very spectacular approach would be an adaption of the "Brainbow" method, as described by Livet, 2007 (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17972876). There are some pretty interesting images available. This technique was used to generate differently stained cells in the brain.
It might be possible to take advantage of different splicing patterns in different tissues, like designing two different exons to code for your fluorescent proteins, flanked by tissue specific splicing enhancers/silencers so that one of them is spliced out and the other is fused to your protein of interest, depending on tissue that your gene of interest is expressed in.
- Badges
- Science topic
- Similar topics
- Medicine
- Disease
- Disease Models
- Animal Models