Journal of the American Chemical Society
Article
of the leaving quencher was indeed an important factor for the
probe design strategy. However, the fast elimination step
induced undesirable autodegradation of FCAP2. This instability
was overcome by oxidizing the sulfur atom in the design of
FCAPO2. In addition, the linker length between the
fluorophore and the β-lactam was optimized to achieve high
synthetic yields.
tization of FCAPO2 to FCAPO2-DA enabled no-wash
fluorogenic labeling of intracellular proteins. No-wash fluoro-
genic labeling for intracellular proteins is very rare, although we
have developed an alternative no-wash labeling method by
using highly diluted prodrug-based β-lactam probes.14 Our no-
wash fluorogenic labeling system described herein would
evidently be an innovative technique that provides various
applications in cell biology, one of which is described in this
paper. Moreover, the fluorophore can be extended to near-
infrared (NIR) fluorescent dyes, which are more suitable for in
vivo studies. These results and discussion confirm the practical
utility and promise of the mutant β-lactamase-tag-based protein
labeling technology in biological studies, especially those on
protein trafficking, gene expression, protein degradation, etc.
Another essence of the probe design is the physical
properties of the leaving quencher. The quencher in
FCAPO2 is the cationic azopyridinium form, and it converts
into the neutral azopyridine form after elimination. The
absorption spectrum of the azopyridinium shows the maximum
at 581 nm and broadly ranges from 500 to 600 nm. Thus, this
compound works as an efficient quencher for fluorescein. This
wavelength region is also suitable for the quenching of orange
to light-red fluorescent dyes such as rhodamines. Although
DABCYL is often used as the quencher in many quenching
FRET-based probes,17 the shorter-wavelength absorption (λmax
= 462 nm) restricts its application to red fluorescent dyes. The
higher molar extinction coefficient of the azopyridinium (ε =
37 000 M−1 cm−1) than that of DABCYL (ε = 25 500 M−1
cm−1)7 also confirms its utility in quenching FRET applications.
Hydrophilicity of azopyridinium provides another practical
advantage in biological experiments. In live cell imaging,
hydrophobic probes often cause localization at membranes or
subcellular organelles. With regard to this point, FCAPO2
including azopyridinium showed less accumulative properties,
as compared with DABCYL-based probes. In addition, the
cationic aromatic heterocycle may compensate the anionic
charge of the adjacent carboxy group in cephalosporin by
forming an inner salt, because FCAPO2-DA permeates living
cells without the protection of the carboxylate in cephalosporin.
In widely used protocols for other protein labeling
techniques, at least 15-min incubation with the probes and
subsequent washing procedure are required.18 Such procedures
restrict temporal resolution and diverse experimental designs.
In this study, we achieved real-time pulse-chase analysis, and
discriminatively visualized the internalization of cell surface-
displayed proteins and the translocation of newly expressed
proteins to plasma membranes. This innovative real-time
imaging provided the information about how fast protein
expression occurs on the plasma membranes and how fast the
proteins enter the cells. Conventional methods using FPs
cannot afford to discriminate proteins that have the same
amino acid sequence but different functions or history. Urano
et al. and Correa, Jr. et al. separately reported similar real-time
fluorogenic labeling probes based on SNAP-tag technology.13,19
However, our BL-tag-based system with FCAPO2 exhibited
much faster labeling kinetics (Table S1, Supporting Informa-
tion) and requires a lower probe concentration.
ASSOCIATED CONTENT
■
S
* Supporting Information
Materials, instruments, synthesis and characterization of
compounds, experimental procedures, and supplementary
figures and schemes. This material is available free of charge
W
* Web-Enhanced Features
Movie 1, showing fluorogenic labeling of cell surface BL-EGFR
with 10 nM FCAPO2 at 37 °C over 20 min, is available in the
HTML version of this paper.
AUTHOR INFORMATION
■
Corresponding Author
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
■
This work was supported by the Japan Society for the
Promotion of Science (JSPS) through its Funding Program
for World-Leading Innovative R&D on Science and Technol-
ogy (FIRST Program), the Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research
from the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science, and
Technology (MEXT) of Japan, by the CREST funding
program from the Japan Science and Technology Agency
(JST), and by the Grant-in-Aid from the Ministry of Health,
Labor, and Welfare (MHLW) of Japan. K.K. is thankful for
support from the Takeda Science Foundation and from the
Naito Foundation. S.M. is thankful for support from Inamori
Foundation and from Sumitomo Foundation. K.K. and S.M. are
thankful for support from Asahi Glass Foundation. S.W. is
thankful for support from a Global COE Fellowship of Osaka
University and a JSPS Research Fellowship.
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In conclusion, we developed second-generation fluorogenic
labeling probes by exploiting an azopyridinium compound as
the leaving quencher. By rational optimization of the probe
structures, we reached the design of FCAPO2, which
specifically labeled BL-tag proteins and very quickly recovered
its fluorescence. In a detailed kinetic study of fluorogenic
labeling, the bimolecular reaction rate was the highest among
the known selective and fluorogenic protein labeling methods.
The outstanding properties of FCAPO2 provided a versatile
cell surface protein labeling system that does not require any
washing procedure. In addition, membrane-permeable deriva-
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dx.doi.org/10.1021/ja208290f | J. Am. Chem.Soc. 2012, 134, 1623−1629