Amazing stuff!
"As cells perform their everyday functions, they turn on a variety of genes and cellular pathways. MIT engineers have now coaxed cells to inscribe the history of these events in a long protein chain that can be imaged using a light microscope.
Cells programmed to produce these chains continuously add building blocks that encode particular cellular events. Later, the ordered protein chains can be labeled with fluorescent molecules and read under a microscope, allowing researchers to reconstruct the timing of the events. ..."
From the abstract:
"Observing cellular physiological histories is key to understanding normal and disease-related processes. Here we describe expression recording islands—a fully genetically encoded approach that enables both continual digital recording of biological information within cells and subsequent high-throughput readout in fixed cells. The information is stored in growing intracellular protein chains made of self-assembling subunits, human-designed filament-forming proteins bearing different epitope tags that each correspond to a different cellular state or function (for example, gene expression downstream of neural activity or pharmacological exposure), allowing the physiological history to be read out along the ordered subunits of protein chains with conventional optical microscopy. We use expression recording islands to record gene expression timecourse downstream of specific pharmacological and physiological stimuli in cultured neurons and in living mouse brain, with a time resolution of a fraction of a day, over periods of days to weeks."
Recording of cellular physiological histories along optically readable self-assembling protein chains (open access)
Fig. 1: Concept and development of linear protein self-assembly-based cellular physiology recording devices.
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