Video of the Month

The field of optogenetics – the use of light-responsive proteins to control events in the cells of living tissue – has gained popularity as a research tool over the past few years, but has been somewhat limited by the need to use heavily-modified non-native proteins. In recent research (1), Klaus Hahn, Nikolay Dokholyan, and Onur Dagliyan (The University of North Carolina) share a new approach that uses a “switch” to make a native protein light-responsive but otherwise intact – “just the way nature made it” (2).

When the blue circle appears in the video below, fibroblasts are being irradiated, which activates a guanine exchange factor (PA-Vav2) and inhibits its substrate, Rac1, resulting in a change in cell morphology.

^{Credit: The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill/Video by Onur Dagliyan.}