Peter Ritchie with Rolfe Petschek & Maureen McEnery (School of Medicine)

Protein Co-Localization Using Gold Colloid Coupled Antibodies

Immuno-fluorescence microscopy employs fluorochromes bound to antibodies to localize proteins.  These are certain fluorescent dyes bound to specific locations on antibodies to enable immunofluorescence.  Such dyes will be coupled to antibodies that bind to specific amino acid sequences on a protein.  This project is aimed at examining how and if gold colloids coupled to another of antibody can be used to determine if the two proteins are in the same place by changing the absorption and propagation of light.  We will examine theoretically and experimentally the possibility that gold colloids change the fluorescence of dyes over the 20nm length scale of antibodies, in an empirically observable and interesting way.  There are many applications for techniques which co-localize protein pairs on such short length scales or determine the spatial proximity of specific amino acid sequences and separate proteins.