1.10.6. How to Visualize Biomolecules in Living Cells?

1.10.6.1. Introduction
As was discussed earlier, Living systems are composed of networks of several interacting biopolymers, ions and metabolites. These cellular components drive a complex array of cellular processes, many of which cannot be observed when the biomolecules are examined in their purified, isolated forms. Therefore, researchers have begun to study biological processes in living cells and in whole organisms instead of testing in laboratory in test tubes. To do so tracking the molecules is necessary within the cell’s native environments. Direct detection of few biomolecules in complex biomolecular environment is possible but for all other cases we have to depend on indirect detection techniques. Thus, several methods have been developed to equip cellular components with reporter tags for visualization and isolation from biological samples.
The most popular strategy for cellular imaging involves tagging of the green fluorescent protein (GFP) and its related variants to a biomolecule of interest. Tagging of these fluorescent probes to a target protein enables visualization by fluorescence microscopy. GFP tags can also be used to analyze whole organisms focusing the proteins. Almost every cellular process related to proteins has been studied using GFP like tags.
However, GFP tagging suffers from several short comings such as-(a) tagging causes structural perturbation which in turn influence the protein expression, localization or function; (b) visualized is possible only by optical methods; (c) GFP tagging only be applied to proteneceous materials and cannot be applied to visualize non-proteinaceous components (a significant fraction of cellular biomass) of cell like glycans, lipids, nucleic acids or the thousands of small organic metabolites. Therefore, methods to visualize both proteins, their modifiers, and other non-proteinaceous components would enable us understanding of the whole organism proteome.
To track biomolecules in living cells and whole organisms, Antibody conjugates have been widely used. However, because of the large size and physical properties, access of these reagents to antigens within cells and outside of the vasculature in living animals is a problem.
Therefore, we see that a large molecule tag is not suitable to meet all research need without hampering the cellular activity. Thus, a small molecular fluorescent tagging approach (like tagging of biotin, fluorophores and numerous other small-molecule reporters) has been developed and utilized owing to the availability of reacting centre/functionality within a biomolecule. However, the site-specific chemical modification of biomolecules remains a very difficult task.

Figure 1.35: Schematic of bioorthogonal chemical reporters’ strategy to visualize cell’s biomolecules.

Needs for tagging biomolecules uncovered the bioorthogonal chemical reporters strategy to tag biomolecules. Incorporation of unique chemical functionality (a bioorthogonal chemical reporter) into a target biomolecule using the cell's own biosynthetic machinery is the main part of this strategy. Therefore, using this techniques, proteins, glycans and lipids have all been tagged/labeled with chemical reporters in living cells and then ligated with reactive probes. This strategy has also been applied in monitoring enzyme activities and tagging cell surface glycans in whole organisms.

1.10.6.2. Existing Bioorthogonal Chemical Reporter Systems:

A number of chemical motifs are reported which possess the required qualities of biocompatibility and selective reactivity. Thus they are today well known bioorthogonal chemical reporters in living cells. This group comprises (1) peptide sequences that can be ligated with small-molecule imaging probes, (2) cell surface electrophiles that can be tagged with hydrazide and aminooxy derivatives, (3) azides that can be selectively modified with phosphines or activated alkynes, and (4) terminal alkynes that can be ligated with azides (Table 1).

Table 1: Chemical reporters and bioorthogonal reactions used in living systems.